Director, Program Management Office
Leads and scales the Program Management Office to enhance planning, prioritization, and delivery across Research and Engineering teams during rapid growth. Partners with executives on strategy execution, builds high-performing TPM/PM teams, and drives organizational alignment using Agile and modern tools.
About the job
Responsibilities
Build & Scale the PMO
- Build and scale the Program Management Office, including organizational structure, role definitions, career paths, and leadership layers, while maintaining a high hiring and onboarding bar during rapid growth
- Establish scalable, lightweight standards for planning, delivery, and reporting that improve consistency and outcomes without slowing teams down
- Adapt delivery models, processes, and tooling to support increasing organizational size, complexity, and geographic distribution
Strategic Partnership & Execution
- Partner with executive leadership to translate strategic goals into executable programs and projects
- Establish visibility into priorities, capacity, dependencies, risks, and delivery progress
- Define and operationalize meaningful metrics to improve predictability, transparency, and decision-making
- Lead and evolve operational practices in scaled environments while adapting frameworks to organizational context
People Leadership
- Build, lead, and develop a high-performing team of Technical Program Managers and Program Managers, including hiring, coaching, mentoring, and succession planning
- Advocate for PMO capacity, workload, and professional development with senior leadership
- Create an environment of psychological safety, continuous improvement, and shared ownership during periods of growth and change
Organizational Influence & Change Leadership
- Navigate and align stakeholders with differing priorities and opinions, driving clarity and decisions with diplomacy and conviction
- Communicate clearly with executives about progress, risks, trade-offs, and required decisions
- Lead organizational change thoughtfully, challenging existing processes when they no longer serve the organization while respecting what works
Requirements
- 10+ years in program, portfolio, or delivery leadership roles, with at least 5 years of people management experience
- Proven experience building or scaling a PMO in a hyper-growth environment (startup scale-up or high-growth division)
- Demonstrated ability to design organizational structures, career ladders, and leadership layers, including experience with geographically distributed teams
- Hands-on expertise with execution and delivery frameworks, such as Agile methodologies, particularly Scrum, including experience adapting frameworks for different organizational contexts and operating at scale
- Experience with setting up and driving adoption of modern project management and productivity tools (Jira, Confluence, Smartsheet, Excel/Google docs, genAI) to support prioritization, resourcing and delivery insights
- Strong human-centric leadership skills, including coaching, mentoring, and advocating for team with senior leadership
- Proven ability to influence across levels and functions without formal authority, with high emotional intelligence
- Bachelor’s degree in a technical field
Skills
Jira, Confluence, Smartsheet, Agile, Scrum, Google Docs, Generative AI, Excel
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