Principal Technical Program Manager

Key Responsibilities

Program Strategy and Leadership

• Lead highly complex, enterprise-scale technical programs involving multiple engineering teams, products, platforms, or business functions.
• Translate strategic priorities into clear program objectives, roadmaps, milestones, deliverables, and measurable success criteria.
• Define program scope, operating models, governance structures, decision-making processes, and accountability mechanisms.
• Align technical execution with product, customer, operational, security, and business priorities.
• Provide strategic recommendations based on technical constraints, delivery risks, dependencies, and organizational capacity.
• Drive programs from early planning and design through implementation, launch, adoption, and operational transition.

Cross-Functional Execution

• Coordinate work across software engineering, infrastructure, cloud, product management, architecture, security, quality assurance, operations, finance, and other stakeholder groups.
• Establish integrated plans that account for dependencies, sequencing, staffing, testing, release readiness, and operational support.
• Facilitate planning sessions, technical reviews, program checkpoints, and executive steering meetings.
• Clarify ownership and ensure teams understand commitments, deadlines, dependencies, and expected outcomes.
• Identify execution gaps and work with functional leaders to establish practical recovery plans.
• Maintain momentum across programs with competing priorities and distributed ownership.

Risk, Dependency, and Issue Management

• Proactively identify technical, operational, organizational, financial, and delivery risks.
• Develop mitigation strategies, contingency plans, escalation paths, and decision frameworks.
• Track cross-team dependencies and resolve conflicts that may affect scope, quality, schedule, or business outcomes.
• Lead structured problem-solving efforts for complex issues requiring coordination across multiple organizations.
• Escalate material risks with clear context, impact analysis, options, and recommendations.
• Ensure critical decisions, assumptions, and unresolved issues are documented and communicated.

Technical Partnership

• Develop a strong understanding of relevant system architectures, engineering constraints, service dependencies, and operational requirements.
• Partner with engineering and architecture leaders to evaluate technical approaches, tradeoffs, sequencing, and implementation risks.
• Ensure technical programs address scalability, reliability, security, performance, maintainability, and operational readiness.
• Ask informed technical questions and help teams identify gaps in plans, designs, testing, deployment, and support models.
• Support architecture and design reviews by ensuring decisions are documented, dependencies are understood, and follow-up actions are completed.
• Translate complex technical information into clear business implications for nontechnical stakeholders.

Program Governance and Measurement

• Establish program metrics, dashboards, reporting mechanisms, and review cadences.
• Monitor progress against scope, milestones, quality standards, resource assumptions, and expected outcomes.
• Use data to identify trends, delivery risks, operational concerns, and opportunities for improvement.
• Provide concise, accurate status reporting to engineering leaders, business stakeholders, and executives.
• Ensure program reporting distinguishes completed work, planned work, risks, dependencies, and decisions required.
• Measure program success through outcomes rather than activity alone.

Communication and Stakeholder Management

• Serve as a central point of coordination for program stakeholders.
• Build alignment among teams with different priorities, incentives, and technical perspectives.
• Communicate program status, risks, changes, and decisions in a clear and audience-appropriate manner.
• Prepare executive briefings, decision documents, roadmaps, program reviews, and written recommendations.
• Facilitate difficult conversations and help stakeholders reach timely, well-informed decisions.
• Maintain transparency while avoiding unnecessary reporting overhead.

Operational Excellence and Continuous Improvement

• Improve program-management practices, templates, tools, governance models, and delivery standards.
• Identify recurring execution challenges and develop scalable solutions.
• Promote effective planning, dependency management, risk management, and decision-making practices.
• Create reusable frameworks that improve consistency across technical programs.
• Mentor other technical program managers and contribute to the development of the program-management community.
• Help teams balance delivery speed with quality, security, reliability, and long-term maintainability.

Required Qualifications

• Significant experience in technical program management, engineering program management, product development, software engineering, systems engineering, or a related discipline.
• Demonstrated success leading complex, cross-functional technology programs with multiple teams and interdependent workstreams.
• Strong understanding of the software development lifecycle, including planning, architecture, development, testing, release, deployment, and operational support.
• Experience working closely with engineering, product, architecture, security, infrastructure, and operations teams.
• Proven ability to develop integrated program plans, manage dependencies, identify risks, and drive issues to resolution.
• Ability to understand complex technical concepts and communicate their business and operational implications.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, including the ability to structure ambiguous problems and recommend practical solutions.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Experience preparing materials and presenting program information to senior leaders and executive stakeholders.
• Demonstrated ability to influence decisions and drive accountability without direct authority.
• Strong organizational skills and the ability to manage multiple priorities in a fast-paced environment.
• Experience defining program metrics and using data to evaluate delivery health and outcomes.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience leading cloud, infrastructure, platform, enterprise software, cybersecurity, data, artificial intelligence, or large-scale digital transformation programs.
• Experience managing programs involving distributed systems, service migrations, platform modernization, or enterprise integrations.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms such as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform.
• Understanding of site reliability engineering, DevOps, continuous integration and delivery, observability, and production operations.
• Experience with Agile, Scrum, Kanban, scaled planning, or hybrid delivery models.
• Experience using tools such as Jira, Confluence, Microsoft Project, Smartsheet, Azure DevOps, or equivalent program-management platforms.
• Knowledge of security, privacy, compliance, change-management, or operational-governance requirements.
• Experience leading geographically distributed or globally operating teams.
• Program Management Professional, Agile, Scrum, SAFe, or comparable certification.
• Bachelor’s or advanced degree in computer science, engineering, information systems, business, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.