[Hiring] Program Manager @SmartCat

Role Description

This role is the point where all of that comes together. You'll sit with the client's stakeholders when priorities are set, and you'll own everything that happens after: the release calendar, the readiness process, and the call on whether something goes out. It's a role built on knowing where every team actually stands and making that visible to the people who decide what happens next.

• Program ownership across the account: You hold the single view of every initiative in flight across all vendors, what's happening, who owns it, and how the pieces depend on each other.
• Priorities, together with the client: You run the regular priority discussions with client stakeholders, our delivery managers, and the leads from other vendors.
• Planning and risk: You turn agreed priorities into a plan with milestones people can be held to, and you keep a live view of what could derail it.
• Capacity and sequencing: You see where the conflicts are forming and get them resolved, or escalated, while there is still room to move.
• The release calendar: One plan everyone can look at: what's shipping, who's shipping it, when, and what it depends on.
• Release readiness: You decide what has to be true before anything goes to production.
• Quality across teams: You work with QA leads and engineering managers to ensure consistency in "Ready for production".
• Incidents: When something goes wrong, you get the right people on it, keep track of what's known, and drive it to a decision.
• Improving how we work: Post-release reviews and post-program, run without blame and kept short.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in program management, technical program management or delivery management.
• Experience coordinating delivery across several teams, and across company lines.
• Presence in senior rooms; able to hold a position and be taken seriously by department heads and executives.
• A working grasp of how software gets to production: branching strategies, CI/CD, environments, feature flags, rollbacks, and hotfixes.
• Enough QA judgment to know what good test evidence looks like.
• Experience running incidents and escalations, with engineers and senior stakeholders.
• Real ownership of production releases; you have called go/no-go and lived with the consequences.
• Clear writing; status updates that are understandable by both a CEO and an engineer.
• Professional English at a client-facing level.
• Comfort with a lot of moving parts.

Requirements

• High-traffic consumer platforms, or a regulated domain.
• 24/7 support rotations, on-call, production support models.
• Ability to read a dashboard during a release window.
• ITIL or similar frameworks, used pragmatically.
• PMP, PgMP or SAFe certifications, if reflective of actual work.
• An engineering, QA or SRE background earlier on.
• Consultancy or service company experience; comfortable context-switching.

Benefits

• Clearly defined pay grades: from L1 (talented junior) to L10 (principal).
• The Career path that connects these grades.
• Loyalty coefficient 10% on net compensation after 3 years, 20% after 5 years.
• Knowledge budget.
• Flexible working hours and remote work.
• Transparency in L-levels, salary, strategy, financial reports, and beyond.
• Full support towards gaining expertise.