Job description 

Ford Credit Platform Engineering is looking for a Senior Program Manager specializing in strategic delivery. You will work on highly complex, cross-team, multi-project programs and help to ensure teams are delivering high quality products and services while being responsible for the over-arching roadmap. You will help teams work on predictability and quality while supporting engineering and operational excellence. The role will have the ability to directly impact the future of program management practices at Ford Credit and effect a high degree of change across the Ford Credit Engineering teams. The candidate will make an impact by aligning business and global technology goals while managing relationships across geographically distributed teams and influencing decisions across multiple work streams and executive leadership. The primary customers for the role are engineering leaders, product managers, developers, and analytics teams within Ford Credit. The candidate will have a deep understanding of Lean-Agile program management practices (including SAFe), DevOps, and SRE principles and practices. The candidate’s technical depth should include understanding the principles behind why engineering teams make architectural decisions, including cloud native platforms, streaming data platforms, and the challenges faced when providing secure solutions in regulatory spaces as well as ensuring the privacy of our customers.

RESPONSIBILITIES

In this position, you will…

• Be first line of defense to shield delivery teams from planned and unplanned needs for various purposes 
• Collaborate with Tranformation leadership team to develop Objective and Key Results (OKR’s) for Sr. Leadership team and below 
• Manage intake process for the program/portfolio and coordinate intakes through the phases of assessment, estimation & planning 
• Manage scope change management practices and drive governance to ensure strong scope change control 
• Drive and oversee coordination of cross-functional teams involved in the tranformation to support all aspects of the program 
• Manage the weekly forums of health measurement, dashboard generation, status reporting, risk monitoring, issue escalations, process audit & reporting 
• Maintain the data sanity in tools like Jira, Confluence & Sharepoint 
• Organizors of cross ART collaborative sessions & cadences e.g. Retrospectives 
• Drive alignment among delivery governance with organizational governance 
• Establish quality standards to be followed across the teams. 
• Be the first line of integration with external teams for data measurement & data sharing e.g. L1 & L2 executive teams, Office of CTO, Office of CPO 
• Be first line of integration with teams external to the program for cross dependency tracking e.g. with Insurance, Integration Services.
• Monitor process adherence & activate remediation protocols where needed 
• Provide support to other transformational services e.g. Organization Change Management, User Training, Knowledge Retention etc using the data available in various tools
• Focus on strategy deployment and delivery of critical programs while ensuring the alignment of business and engineering goals.
• Provide on-going visibility to all stakeholders on program status including key decisions, dependencies, risks, issues, metrics, etc.
• Uncover, anticipate, raise, and aggressively remove obstacles which prevent program teams from delivering against expected program outcomes.
• Support the teams to collaboratively drive continuous improvement and create a learning organization to enable speed to market and foster innovation.
• Actively seek to improve the engineering delivery pipeline reducing cycle time and increasing quality and security posture.
• Develop and socialize new program management principles and practices fit for purpose for the organization.
• Create order out of chaos as needed, and masterfully navigate ambiguities to create direction and strategy through discovery and a product mindset.
• Provide thought leadership and perspective across multiple organizations to eliminate knowledge silos.
• Be responsible for tool assessment and recommendation in alignment with program management best practices

QUALIFICATIONS

The minimum requirements we seek…

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or relevant area of study, or equivalent work experience
• 15+ years’ experience in engineering, engineering program management, technical program management, product management, or related area
• Extensive experience using, managing, and supporting teams with Agile program management tools, such as Jira, Rally, Confluence, etc.

Our Preferred Qualifications…

• Master’s Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Business Administration, or related area
• Certification in Project or Program Management such as PMP, etc.
• Certification in Lean-Agile practices, such as Certified Scrum Master or SAFe.
• Experience managing complex programs with solutions relying on cloud-native technologies.
• 15+ years’ experience in engineering, engineering program management, technical program management, product management, or related area
• Extensive experience managing programs supporting Platform service-oriented or SaaS based solutions.
• Strong verbal and written communications skills with the ability to influence the enterprise.