About Us
Zelis is modernizing the healthcare financial experience in the United States (U.S.) across payers, providers, and healthcare consumers. We serve more than 750 payers, including the top five national health plans, regional health plans, TPAs and millions of healthcare providers and consumers across our platform of solutions. Zelis sees across the system to identify, optimize, and solve problems holistically with technology built by healthcare experts – driving real, measurable results for clients.
At Zelis, AI is woven into the fabric of how we work. Every associate is expected - and empowered - to partner with AI to challenge the status quo, accelerate innovation, and amplify their impact. This is a place for builders with a growth mindset who act with agility, embrace change, and use modern technology to shape smarter solutions, exceptional experiences, and the future of our industry for our clients, customers, and our culture.
Why We Do What We Do
In the U.S., consumers, payers, and providers face significant challenges throughout the healthcare financial journey. Zelis helps streamline the process by offering solutions that improve transparency, efficiency, and communication among all parties involved. By addressing the obstacles that patients face in accessing care, navigating the intricacies of insurance claims, and the logistical challenges healthcare providers encounter with processing payments, Zelis aims to create a more seamless and effective healthcare financial system.
Zelis India plays a crucial role in this mission by supporting various initiatives that enhance the healthcare financial experience. The local team contributes to the development and implementation of innovative solutions, ensuring that technology and processes are optimized for efficiency and effectiveness. Beyond operational expertise, Zelis India cultivates a collaborative work culture, leadership development, and global exposure, creating a dynamic environment for professional growth. With hybrid work flexibility, comprehensive healthcare benefits, financial wellness programs, and cultural celebrations, we foster a holistic workplace experience. Additionally, the team plays a vital role in maintaining high standards of service delivery and contributes to Zelis’ award-winning culture.
Position Overview
Technical Program Manager – AI-Enabled Engineering Pods
Role Title: Technical Program Manager – Full Stack, Cloud & AI Engineering
Location: Hyderabad, India
Experience Required: Minimum 14+ years of experience
We are looking for a seasoned Technical Program Manager to lead and manage multiple cross-functional engineering pod teams based in Hyderabad. This role requires strong technical depth, hands-on understanding of modern full stack engineering practices, cloud-native platforms, DevSecOps, and practical experience using AI and Gen AI platforms to improve engineering productivity, delivery predictability, quality, and operational excellence.
The ideal candidate should have prior experience managing complex technology programs involving distributed engineering teams, product owners, architects, developers, QA engineers, DevOps teams, security teams, and business stakeholders. The candidate must be comfortable operating at both strategic and execution levels — driving roadmap alignment, technical delivery, architecture discussions, release governance, dependency management, risk mitigation, and executive-level reporting.
This is not a pure project management role. The candidate is expected to bring strong technical judgment, understand engineering trade-offs, challenge solution approaches where required, and guide teams toward scalable, secure, maintainable, and AI-enabled delivery practices.
Key Responsibilities
Program & Delivery Leadership
- Lead multiple engineering pod teams delivering full stack, cloud-native, and enterprise-grade digital applications.
- Own end-to-end program execution across planning, design, development, testing, release, deployment, and production support.
- Drive delivery predictability across multiple pods by managing scope, schedule, dependencies, risks, milestones, and release commitments.
- Partner with product owners, architects, engineering managers, QA leads, DevOps teams, security teams, and business stakeholders to ensure successful execution.
- Establish clear operating rhythms across sprint planning, backlog refinement, architecture reviews, dependency tracking, release planning, and production readiness.
- Monitor execution health across pods and proactively address blockers, capacity gaps, technical risks, and cross-team dependencies.
- Drive alignment between business objectives, product priorities, technical architecture, and delivery execution.
- Ensure programs are delivered with strong focus on quality, security, scalability, maintainability, and operational stability.
Technical Program Management
- Facilitate technical design discussions across .NET Core, Angular, REST APIs, microservices, cloud platforms, databases, DevSecOps, and integration platforms.
- Partner with architects and senior engineers to validate solution approaches, identify architectural risks, and ensure adherence to enterprise standards.
- Drive technical governance across application architecture, API design, cloud integration, security, performance, observability, and deployment practices.
- Ensure engineering teams follow clean architecture, SOLID principles, secure coding practices, CI/CD standards, and cloud engineering best practices.
- Track and manage technical debt, platform modernization initiatives, production stability issues, and engineering improvement plans.
- Support teams in resolving production issues related to performance, scalability, reliability, integrations, cloud services, and deployment pipelines.
- Ensure delivery teams adopt appropriate engineering metrics, including sprint predictability, defect leakage, deployment frequency, change failure rate, code quality, test coverage, and production incident trends.
AI & Gen AI Enablement
- Drive responsible adoption of AI and Gen AI tools across engineering pods to improve productivity, code quality, documentation, testing, and problem-solving.
- Enable teams to use platforms such as GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT Enterprise, Azure OpenAI, Amazon Q, Gemini, or similar enterprise-approved AI platforms.
- Identify practical AI use cases across software delivery, including code generation, refactoring, unit test generation, API documentation, technical design documentation, defect analysis, and security review support.
- Establish AI usage guardrails aligned with enterprise security, data privacy, compliance, intellectual property, and responsible AI policies.
- Partner with engineering and security teams to evaluate AI-assisted development workflows and ensure safe adoption.
- Track productivity and quality improvements resulting from AI-enabled engineering practices.
- Promote a culture of AI-assisted engineering while ensuring human accountability for design, code quality, security, and production outcomes.
Agile, DevSecOps & Release Governance
- Lead agile execution across multiple pods using Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, or hybrid delivery models.
- Drive consistent sprint ceremonies, backlog hygiene, estimation practices, release planning, and execution governance.
- Ensure CI/CD pipelines, automated deployments, quality gates, code reviews, test automation, security scans, and release approvals are integrated into delivery workflows.
- Partner with DevOps and platform teams to improve deployment reliability, environment stability, monitoring, logging, and incident response.
- Ensure production releases meet defined entry and exit criteria, including quality, security, performance, and operational readiness checks.
- Drive continuous improvement across engineering processes, agile maturity, DevSecOps adoption, and delivery effectiveness.
Stakeholder & Executive Communication
- Provide clear, concise, and data-driven program updates to senior leadership, including Directors, VPs, and CXO-level stakeholders where required.
- Communicate program status, risks, dependencies, financial impacts, delivery trade-offs, and mitigation plans with appropriate executive clarity.
- Prepare roadmap views, release dashboards, dependency maps, risk registers, decision logs, and program health reports.
- Translate complex technical topics into business-relevant insights for non-technical stakeholders.
- Drive decision-making across competing priorities, delivery constraints, architecture options, and risk scenarios.
Required Skills and Experience
- Minimum 14+ years of overall technology experience, with strong background in software engineering, technical delivery, program management, or engineering leadership.
- Proven experience managing multiple engineering pods or cross-functional agile teams in a complex enterprise environment.
- Strong technical understanding of full stack application delivery using .NET Core / ASP.NET Core, Angular, C#, TypeScript, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.
- Solid understanding of REST APIs, microservices, backend services, cloud-native application patterns, and scalable web architectures.
- Experience working with AWS and/or Azure cloud platforms.
- Strong understanding of relational databases such as SQL Server, PostgreSQL, or MySQL.
- Good understanding of application security, authentication, authorization, identity management, logging, monitoring, and performance optimization.
- Experience with CI/CD pipelines, DevSecOps practices, Git-based workflows, automated deployment, and production release governance.
- Working knowledge of containerization and orchestration platforms such as Docker and Kubernetes.
- Familiarity with event-driven systems and messaging platforms such as Azure Service Bus, AWS SQS/SNS, Kafka, or RabbitMQ.
- Experience with Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform, ARM templates, Bicep, or AWS CloudFormation.
- Practical experience using AI or Gen AI platforms such as GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, Azure OpenAI, Amazon Q, Gemini, or equivalent tools.
- Strong understanding of agile delivery models, sprint execution, roadmap planning, dependency management, and engineering metrics.
- Ability to challenge technical assumptions, identify delivery risks, and drive resolution across engineering, product, QA, DevOps, security, and business teams.
- Excellent communication skills with ability to engage senior leadership and technical teams with equal effectiveness.
Preferred Technical Capabilities
- Prior hands-on software engineering experience before moving into technical program management or engineering leadership.
- Experience managing enterprise-scale modernization, cloud migration, platform transformation, or digital product engineering programs.
- Exposure to regulated industries such as healthcare, fintech, insurance, life sciences, or other compliance-heavy environments.
- Strong understanding of enterprise architecture governance, security reviews, audit requirements, and compliance controls.
- Experience with observability platforms, production support models, SRE practices, and incident management.
- Experience implementing AI-assisted SDLC practices across large engineering teams.
- Understanding of responsible AI, AI governance, data privacy, secure prompt usage, and enterprise AI adoption frameworks.
AI Platform Expectations
The candidate should be hands-on and comfortable using AI platforms to:
- Improve engineering productivity across multiple pod teams.
- Assist with code review, code generation, and refactoring analysis.
- Generate unit test cases and improve test coverage.
- Support API documentation, architecture documentation, and technical design documentation.
- Analyze technical designs, logs, defects, and production issues for faster triage.
- Identify security, performance, and maintainability concerns in application delivery.
- Build reusable AI-enabled workflows for engineering teams.
- Promote responsible AI adoption in alignment with enterprise policies.
- Ensure AI tools are used as productivity accelerators while preserving engineering accountability, security, and compliance.
Leadership & Soft Skills
- Strong ownership mindset with ability to operate independently in a senior leadership-facing role.
- Excellent stakeholder management, negotiation, and conflict-resolution skills.
- Ability to lead multiple teams through ambiguity, changing priorities, and complex dependencies.
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
- Ability to balance delivery speed with technical quality, security, scalability, and maintainability.
- Strong communication skills with ability to simplify complex technical issues for executive audiences.
- Ability to mentor pod leads, scrum masters, technical leads, and engineering teams on delivery discipline and engineering best practices.
- Strong execution discipline with focus on measurable outcomes, delivery transparency, and continuous improvement.
Commitment to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging
At Zelis, we champion diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in all aspects of our operations. We embrace the power of diversity and create an environment where people can bring their authentic and best selves to work. We know that a sense of belonging is key not only to your success at Zelis, but also to your ability to bring your best each day.
Equal Employment Opportunity
Zelis is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.
Accessibility Support
We are dedicated to ensuring our application process is accessible to all candidates. If you are a qualified individual with a disability and require reasonable accommodation with any part of the application and/or interview process, please email [email protected].