Title: Program Manager with AI Experience (15 Years)
Location: Jersey City, NJ
Type: Contract
Role Purpose
The Program Manager leads complex, cross-functional product and technology initiatives in an AI-powered SDLC. This role sits at the intersection of program leadership, product thinking, engineering orchestration, and innovation enablement — driving faster delivery while upholding governance, customer focus, and business alignment.
The role owns and leads across all core skill areas: multi-project delivery plans and risk frameworks, executive stakeholder management, backlog and delivery standards, program KPIs, AI adoption governance, and PMO capability development.
Key Responsibilities
Program Delivery & Planning
• Partner closely with VPs, Directors, and Development Managers to contribute to the design of delivery plans — providing input on dependencies, buffers, and critical path — and supporting capacity management across location-distributed teams.
• Facilitate and coordinate structured RAID processes across programs, working alongside senior leadership to ensure risks and issues are surfaced, owned, tracked, and resolved effectively.
• Support the establishment of change governance, release, and dependency-coordination frameworks; contribute to the definition of program-level KPIs and help connect delivery metrics to product and business outcomes.
• Continuously evaluate and refine delivery processes, identifying inefficiencies and introducing improved ways of working — whether through tooling, methods, or structural changes to how programs are run.
Risk & Dependency Management
• Own the program-level risk & dependency management process end-to-end — maintaining a live risk & dependency register, facilitating regular reviews with VPs, Directors, and Development Managers, and ensuring risks are properly assessed, assigned, mitigated, and escalated where necessary.
• Proactively identify emerging risks and dependencies across workstreams — including delivery, technical, resourcing, and third-party risks — and work with senior stakeholders to develop and execute mitigation and contingency plans.
• Facilitate dependency resolution forums and coordination rituals with VPs, Directors, Development Managers, and delivery teams — surfacing blockers early and driving timely resolution before they impact the critical path.
Stakeholder Management
• Work closely with VP and Director-level stakeholders and Development Managers — supporting alignment across organizational boundaries, contributing to executive narratives, and producing portfolio health reporting.
• Champion inclusive and transparent communication practices that keep distributed teams informed, engaged, and aligned regardless of geography or time zone.
AI Integration & Governance
• Integrate AI tools and agentic workflows into delivery processes; evaluate tool fitness and safety, run pilots and proof-of-value initiatives, and set AI adoption standards and governance for the PMO function.
Technical Excellence & Engineering Operations
• Contribute to Technical Excellence reviews in partnership with VPs, Directors, and Development Managers — supporting visibility of code coverage, vulnerability remediation, DR capabilities, and cost metrics alongside delivery KPIs.
• Own and improve Engineering Operations practices — incident management, on-call, change and release controls, environment management, and operational readiness.
Product Operations
• Champion Product Operations across the delivery function, partnering with Product and Project Managers to keep roadmaps well-maintained, accurately prioritized, and aligned to current business and customer needs.
• Establish and uphold standards for roadmap hygiene — ensuring items are clearly defined, appropriately sequenced, free of duplication, and consistently linked to strategic objectives and measurable outcomes.
• Define and embed Product Operations practices including intake governance, feature lifecycle management, backlog health reviews, and cross-team prioritization ceremonies.
• Act as the connective tissue between product planning and delivery execution — reducing friction, improving visibility, and ensuring that what is planned is genuinely deliverable within capacity and dependency constraints.
• Partner with Product Managers to improve the quality and consistency of product artefacts — including epics, user stories, acceptance criteria, and release plans — raising the bar across the function.
PMO Community & Continuous Improvement
• Actively contribute to the PMO community of practice — sharing lessons learned, playbooks, templates, and innovations that raise the collective capability of the function.
• Identify and champion better ways of working across the PMO, whether through process improvements, new tooling, refined standards, or novel delivery approaches proven in the field.
• Participate in and help shape PMO-wide retrospectives, knowledge-sharing forums, and capability-building initiatives, ensuring insights from program delivery feedback into organizational learning.
People & Capability Development
• Coach junior and mid-level Project Managers on facilitation, planning quality, risk thinking, dependency awareness, and product mindset; design and lead complex workshops and set delivery and backlog standards for the function.
• Facilitate innovation workshops, design thinking sessions, hackathons, and AI use-case discovery — driving cross-functional, cross-geography ideation and translating outcomes into actionable delivery initiatives.
Qualifications
Required
• 8–10 years in project/program management, with at least 3 years leading multi-team or cross-functional initiatives in a software product environment.
• Demonstrated experience with AI/ML, automation, digital transformation, or agentic workflow adoption.
• Strong facilitation capability — design thinking, retrospectives, cross-functional planning, and executive alignment sessions.
• Proven ability to manage executive stakeholders and represent a delivery function to C-suite and portfolio leadership.
• Experience managing program-level budgets, capacity planning, and multi-workstream delivery plans.
• Proficiency with Agile/Scrum delivery and modern tooling (Jira, Confluence, Smartsheet, or equivalent).
Preferred
• PMP, PgMP, or equivalent certification; Agile/SAFe certification is a plus.
• Experience in insurance, insurtech, data services, or regulated SaaS environments.
• Familiarity with DORA metrics, Technical Excellence frameworks, and engineering delivery scorecards.
• Experience integrating AI tools (Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, Notion AI) into delivery workflows.
• Exposure to product management frameworks (OKRs, Jobs-to-be-Done, product lifecycle management).
Regards
Dharma Teja Kotagiri
ERP Analysts, Inc.
425 Metro Place | North Ste# 510|Dublin|OH|43017
Mobile: | Office: Ext: 7199
| Fax:
Workday Certified Partner |Oracle Gold Partner | CMMI Level3
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