Director of Program Management

About the role

The Director of Program Management is responsible for leading the global program management function for complex new product development initiatives supporting high-speed interconnect solutions. This role provides strategic leadership across a portfolio of highly technical programs, ensuring disciplined execution from concept through NPI and volume production while maintaining strong alignment with engineering, operations, quality, supply chain, and commercial teams. This position serves as a senior leadership role within the organization, acting as the primary escalation point for program execution, customer commitments, and cross-functional alignment. The Director will lead and develop a team of project and program managers while partnering closely with Engineering leadership, Product Line Management, and key customers to deliver innovative, high-performance products on time and at scale.

Responsibilities

• Lead the program management organization responsible for executing a global portfolio of high-speed product development programs.
• Own end-to-end program execution from concept, development, and validation through NPI and volume production.
• Establish and enforce program management best practices, tools, governance, and execution discipline across the organization.
• Serve as the senior escalation point for program risks, schedule challenges, cost issues, and cross-functional conflicts.
• Recruit, mentor, and develop project and program managers, providing coaching, performance feedback, and career development guidance.
• Allocate resources across programs, balance workload, and ensure appropriate staffing to meet business priorities.
• Promote a culture of accountability, transparency, execution rigor, and continuous improvement.
• Partner closely with Engineering leadership to align program execution with technical roadmaps, product architectures, and validation strategies.
• Ensure strong coordination across engineering disciplines (mechanical, electrical, signal integrity, test), operations, quality, and supply chain.
• Drive Design for Manufacturability (DFM), Design for Test (DFT), and operational readiness throughout the product development lifecycle.
• Act as a senior interface for key customers, communicating program status, schedules, risks, and technical requirements.
• Support customer engagements with hyperscalers, system OEMs, and AI platform providers to ensure alignment on deliverables and timelines.
• Communicate portfolio-level updates to executive leadership and business stakeholders.
• Ensure program financial compliance, including cost modeling, budget tracking, capital requests, and management of scope changes.
• Drive decisions that optimize time-to-market, time-to-volume, and time-to-profitability.
• Oversee capacity planning and readiness to support projected demand and product launches.
• Lead structured risk identification, mitigation