Group Director, Program Manager

dept; United States; On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

DEPT is seeking a highly strategic Group Director, Program Manager to lead a large AI-enabled engineering partnership. You will bridge decentralized business units with a centralized MarTech team, shaping an operating model and ROI for executive stakeholders.

In this role you will orchestrate intake, governance, and reporting across senior sponsors and TPMs, while driving scalable processes and shared playbooks for enterprise-wide adoption. A strategic, outcomes-driven mindset is essential.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of technical program management or related roles.
• Ability to navigate highly matrixed enterprise organizations and build consensus.
• Experience building intake matrices, triage workflows, and operational playbooks.
• Exceptional communication skills translating technical challenges into business impact for senior leadership.
• Strong technical fluency without needing to write code.

Responsibilities

• Strategic intake & triage: design intake framework, route requests to the right technical track (consultation, prototyping, production scaling).
• Cross-functional leadership & governance: coordinate between decentralized units and central engineering architecture teams; align with roadmaps.
• Executive communications & measurement: define KPIs, report ROI, and ensure stakeholder alignment; establish operating readiness.

Skills

Technical program management

Strategic agility

Process architecture

Executive presence

Technical fluency

Job description

WHY DEPT®?

We are a Growth Invention company built to help the world's most ambitious brands grow faster. Operating at the intersection of technology and marketing, we create what is next by pioneering ideas, acting fast, and moving further because standing still just is not in our DNA.

We are drawn to people who stay curious, move with intent, and never stop inventing. Our culture runs on three values: better together, relentlessly curious, and get sh*t done. It is how we work, how we grow, and how we make things that matter.

At DEPT®, you will find the freedom to explore, the space to collaborate, and the trust to make a real impact for our clients, for each other, and for the world we are helping to build.

The Role:

DEPT® is seeking a highly strategic Group Director, Program Manager to act as the overarching owner for a large, high-velocity AI-enablement engineering partnership with a premier enterprise client. In this role, you will serve as the operational and strategic bridge between localized, fast-moving business units and a centralized technical MarTech team.

Working in a tight, collective partnership with the Senior Engineering Lead - who oversees the technical execution of dedicated development pods - you will orchestrate the entire engagement lifecycle. While they drive the builds, you will govern the intake pipelines, business alignment, and cross-functional reporting. This role is not just about tracking tickets; it is about shaping a new operating model, anticipating scale, and proving exponential ROI to executive stakeholders.

What you'll do

• Strategic intake & triageManage the front door: Design, own, and refine a structured intake framework that evaluates incoming business requests and routes them to the appropriate technical track (e.g., technical consultation, rapid prototyping, or full production scaling).Host strategic consultation: Facilitate open office hours and advisory sessions to help business stakeholders refine their low-code/ideation prototypes and align on precise business requirements before development begins.Control the floodgates: Map and execute a phased rollout and staggered intake strategy to sustainably manage engineering bandwidth and scale program adoption without overwhelming the team.
• Cross-functional leadership & governanceStrategic orchestration: Serve as the primary connective tissue between decentralized business units and the central engineering architecture team, operating in lockstep with the Senior Engineering Lead to ensure all operational, communication, and technical goals are met collectively.Drive business alignment: Partner directly with enterprise Product Sponsors and Technical Product Managers (TPMs) to coordinate intake prioritization and ensure all localized builds align with overarching corporate roadmap goals.Anticipate and orchestrate scale: Partner closely with engineering and business leads to forecast demand, proactively identifying when to seamlessly scale engineering capacity up or down to match evolving business roadmaps and team growth.Scale what works: Ensure that bespoke breakthroughs and local learnings are codified, synthesized, and transformed into shared, repeatable playbooks for the broader enterprise.
• Executive communications & measurementEvangelize program wins: Go beyond standard metrics by actively defining what "success" looks like across different business units. Craft and broadcast compelling success stories and operational wins across the entire enterprise to showcase tangible impact and drive ongoing program adoption.Prove the value: Define, measure, and report on critical program KPIs, translating engineering velocity and cost consolidation into clear, executive-level ROI narratives.Stakeholder alignment: Own the cross-functional communication strategy, ensuring transparent, predictable reporting across disparate teams, engineering leads, and C-suite stakeholders.Operational readiness: Manage the critical path for program onboarding, ensuring all foundational technical dependencies, access permissions, and service level agreements (SLAs) are locked in for seamless execution.

What you'll bring

• Senior-level experience: 7+ years of experience in technical program management, product operations, product management, or technical account management, ideally within enterprise software, AI-enablement, or complex cloud environments.
• Strategic agility: Proven ability to navigate highly matrixed, ambiguous enterprise organizations and build consensus among competing stakeholder priorities.
• Process architecture: Deep experience building intake matrices, triage workflows, and operational playbooks from scratch.
• Executive presence: Exceptional communication skills with the ability to translate deeply technical engineering challenges into clear business impacts for senior leadership.
• Technical fluency: While you do not need to write code, you must possess a strong fundamental understanding of moder