Technical Program Manager
SCIGON · Oak Brook, IL · 2 wk ago
HybridInformation Technology$101k–$135k/yrFull-time
Technical Program Manager
We’re looking for a Technical Program Manager who thrives at the intersection of engineering complexity and organizational clarity. You’ll work directly with engineering directors, platform leads, and cross-functional stakeholders to drive programs that span multiple teams — ensuring alignment, surfacing blockers, and keeping high-priority initiatives moving. This is not a coordination role. You’ll be expected to develop deep technical fluency in a modern platform engineering environment — including infrastructure, developer experience, and cloud-native systems — and use that fluency to ask better questions, identify risks early, and translate complex technical work into clear executive narratives.
WHAT YOU’LL DO
- Own end-to-end delivery of large, multi-team technical programs across platform infrastructure, developer experience, and cloud enablement.
- Define program structure, milestones, dependencies, and success criteria in collaboration with engineering and product leads.
- Maintain a current view of program health; proactively surface risks, dependencies, and blockers to the right stakeholders at the right time.
- Drive accountability without authority — build trust with engineering teams while holding commitments firm.
Technical Engagement
- Develop working fluency in platform technologies (Kubernetes, Terraform, ArgoCD, CI/CD pipelines, cloud infrastructure) to engage credibly with engineers and leads.
- Participate in architecture reviews, sprint ceremonies, and design discussions — not as a scribe, but as a contributor to program-level thinking.
- Identify technical debt and complexity that creates delivery risk; help shape sequencing decisions accordingly.
Stakeholder Communication
- Translate program status and engineering progress into clear, concise communication for senior leadership and non-technical stakeholders.
- Prepare and facilitate executive-level program reviews, QBRs, and steering committee meetings.
- Build and maintain strong relationships with engineering leads, product managers, and business partners across the organization.
Process & Operational Excellence
- Identify gaps in how programs are planned, tracked, or communicated — and drive improvements without adding bureaucratic overhead.
- Support the development and adoption of program management frameworks, templates, and tooling across a platform engineering organization.
- Contribute to the OKR process by helping teams translate strategic intent into measurable, deliverable outcomes.
Required
- 5+ years of program or project management experience in a software engineering or infrastructure environment.
- Demonstrated ability to manage large, complex programs spanning multiple engineering teams with competing priorities.
- Strong technical background — you don’t need to write production code, but you must be able to engage deeply with engineers on technical tradeoffs, architecture decisions, and delivery constraints.
- Excellent written and verbal communication; proven ability to tailor message and level of detail to the audience.
- Experience working in agile/scrum environments; comfortable with Jira, Confluence, and similar tools.
- Proven track record of operating effectively in matrixed organizations with distributed, cross-functional teams.
PREFERRED
- Experience in IoT, connected systems, or cloud-native platform engineering environments.
- Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform), container orchestration (Kubernetes), or GitOps (ArgoCD).
- Experience driving developer experience (DevEx), developer productivity, or internal platform initiatives.
- PMP, PMI-ACP, SAFe, or equivalent certification.
- Background in building internal platform-as-a-product programs or developer self-service tooling.
Salary
$101,250-$135,000