Technical Program Manager

About the role

Success as an Engineering Program Manager (EPM) requires someone who brings structure to ambiguity and drives delivery clarity across teams. You thrive in a fast-paced environment, build strong partnerships with engineering and program leaders, and ensure work is prioritized and executed with discipline. You are comfortable operating at both the strategic and tactical levels: shaping what should be worked on, aligning cross-functional stakeholders, and ensuring delivery plans, risks, and dependencies are visible and actively managed. You communicate crisply—writing clear leadership updates and facilitating alignment when tradeoffs are required.

Responsibilities

• Help drive the "system of delivery" and ensure the domain's work is focused on the most important outcomes, aligned to VC&M strategy, and planned/governed consistently.
• Establish the structures and mechanisms that enable predictable delivery (backlog structure, planning artifacts, governance cadence, reporting hygiene).
• Challenge and de-prioritize work that does not support the strategy or agreed priorities (in partnership with Technical Program Manager (TPM), Product, and VC&M leadership).
• Co-own the domain backlog structure, PI planning, and the domain delivery plan (scope, milestones, dependencies), within the strategic frame set by TPMs and leadership.
• Prioritize within the domain, with Engineering Manager input, to ensure capacity is focused on the highest-value work.
• Drive clarity for cross-team sequencing and integration planning so commitments are realistic and well-understood.
• Maintain accurate internal risk and dependency registers; actively drive resolution, mitigation plans, and escalation paths.
• Keep Atlassian artifacts and dashboards up to date so domain and program status is trustworthy and comparable across VC&M.
• Provide clear, timely communications to stakeholders on progress, risks, and changes.
• Ensure work has clear acceptance criteria and a defined value/outcome.
• At completion, validate with Engineering and TPMs whether acceptance criteria were met and whether the intended value was delivered.
• Participate and provide key inputs to the cross-functional work intake discovery process; cascade with context to all impacted functions within your domain.
• Apply and help evolve common VC&M standards for discovery, planning, and delivery.
• Ensure the domain "plugs into" the broader VC&M operating model using shared templates and cadences.

How you'll do it

• Build strong partnerships across engineering, program, product, design, systems, testing, operations, safety/regulatory, release, and quality.
• Drive alignment through clear tradeoffs, documented decisions, and transparent plans.
• Use data and delivery signals (risks, dependencies, throughput/health indicators) to inform priorities and leadership actions.

Skills

• Project Management: Identifying a critical-path dependency between three teams mid-PI, escalating it with a clear impact assessment, and coordinating a re-sequencing plan that kept the overall launch date intact.
• Project Planning: Building an integrated delivery timeline for a feature spanning multiple teams/areas—identifying the critical path, buffering handoff points, and aligning each team's sprint cadence to avoid idle time between dependent deliverables.
• Program Management: Orchestrating end-to-end PI planning across multiple teams: running capacity analysis, facilitating the planning event, negotiating cross-team dependencies, and publishing a committed plan with tiered objectives.
• Jira: Enforcing backlog hygiene across multiple teams by ensuring every epic has acceptance criteria, a target PI, an assigned owner, and properly linked stories—then using advanced JQL queries and automation rules to flag stale issues, catch unlinked work items, and prevent status transitions without required fields, so dashboards stay trustworthy and leadership reporting never requires manual cleanup.
• Conflict Management: Mediating a priority disagreement between product and engineering by facilitating a data-driven tradeoff discussion, resulting in a mutually agreed split between new feature work and tech-debt reduction.
• Technical Communication: Translating a complex platform migration plan (e.g., EKS to GCP) into a one-page executive summary that highlights timeline, risks, and decisions needed—without requiring the audience to understand the underlying infrastructure.
• Agile Software Development: Tracking predictability metrics (say/do ratio, carry-over percentage, capacity allocations) across PIs and using retrospective data to make concrete planning adjustments that measurably improve commitment accuracy.

Requirements

• 4 years of experience in IT.
• 1 year of experience in Program Management.
• Expertise in Project Management.
• Bachelor's Degree.

Benefits

• Medical and Dental (FastTek pays majority of the medical program).
• Vision.
• Personal Time Off (PTO) Program.
• Long Term Disability (100% paid).
• Life Insurance (100% paid).
• 401(k) with immediate vesting and 3% (of salary) dollar-for-dollar match.
• Lucrative employee referral program.
• Employee recognition culture.

FastTek Global was named one of the Top Work Places in Michigan by the Detroit Free Press in 2013–2023.