Senior Director - Strategic Program Management

Early Warning (Zelle); New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Early Warning is seeking a seasoned Program Manager to lead strategic programs, ensuring on-time delivery, budget adherence, and cross-functional collaboration across product, engineering, and business teams. You will shape governance, risk management, and execution frameworks to advance large-scale SaaS initiatives like Zelle and Paze.

The role requires deep experience in regulated financial software, strong leadership, and a proven track record of delivering complex programs in dynamic

Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Business, Program Management and/or Computer Science.
• Experience in financial institutions or similarly regulated industries and/or software development processes.
• 15+ years of program/project management experience and proven people leadership experience.

Responsibilities

• Leads and ensures effective strategic program execution in alignment with deliverables.
• Drives, monitors, and manages the successful execution of technology-intensive products.
• Establishes best practices, templates, policies, tools to expand effectiveness.
• Owns communication of program progress updates with executive leadership and cross-functional leads.

Job description

At Early Warning, we've powered and protected the U.S. financial system for over thirty years with cutting-edge solutions like Zelle® , Paze℠, and so much more. As a trusted name in payments, we partner with thousands of institutions to increase access to financial services and protect transactions for hundreds of millions of consumers and small businesses.

Positions located in Scottsdale, San Francisco, Chicago, or New York follow a hybrid work model to allow for a more collaborative working environment.

Candidates responding to this posting must independently possess the eligibility to work in the United States, for any employer, at the date of hire. This position is ineligible for employment Visa sponsorship.

Overall Purpose

Leads and ensures effective strategic program (projects) execution in alignment with deliverables. Creates and implements policies, procedures and processes to ensure effective program execution. Responsible for providing effective leadership, develop and manage team members to successfully deliver strategic deliverables, on-time and within budget.

Essential Functions

• Drives, monitors, and manages the successful execution of technology-intensive products, ensuring the program stays on time and within budget.
• Proactively monitors project execution performance compared to target, anticipates emerging problems, identifies solutions, and actively engages team members to implement solutions
• Establishes best practices, templates, policies, tools and partnerships to expand, mature and improve effectiveness in support of business objectives.
• Provides effective leadership and develops and manages a highly engaged, high-performance team ensuring effective delivery of program milestones and outcomes in terms of cost, schedule, budget and quality.
• Builds a team of like-minded practitioners who understand your values and methods
• Develops and implements roles, responsibilities, processes, and procedures that are comprehensive from initial ideation through to in-market realization
• Manages multiple aspects of interrelated project workstreams to ensure the overall program is aligned to and supports the achievement of strategic business objectives.
• Monitors project execution performance compared to target and reports on project results, metrics, tests and deployment activities.
• Challenges partners to define realistic schedules and drive the process, ensuring deliverable owners are meeting their committed outcomes while looking ahead to identify emerging blockers and proactively managing risks.
• Engages external partners to assess their schedules and constraints, integrate impacts and dependencies into overall planning to ensure success.
• Evaluates resource capacity and constraints, build program resource models, prepare estimates and detailed project plans for all phases of the project as well as status reporting to capture program milestones, success criteria, deliverables, dependencies, and risks.
• Owns the communication of program progress updates with executive leadership as well as cross-functional workstream leads.
• Proactively mitigates issues and risks, creatively and analytically resolves problems by demonstrating teamwork, innovation and excellence.
• Supports the company's commitment to risk management and protecting the integrity and confidentiality of systems and data.

Minimum Qualifications

• Education and experience typically obtained through completion of a Bachelor's Degree in Business, Program Management and/or Computer Science, or related field.
• Experience in financial institutions or similarly regulated industries and/or software development processes with experience in systems build and run phases of the product lifecycle.
• Minimum of 15 or more years of program/project management experience and proven people leadership experience in matrixed business and technical environments.
• Prior experience related to product launch or large-scale technical product coordination.
• Effective relationship building and team collaboration skills leading diverse, cross-functional teams.
• Highly engaged, self-starter with ability to balance achieving results and fostering collaboration.
• Proactive in identifying and driving process improvements within the organization to achieve higher levels of organizational efficiency and effectiveness.
• Strong team player with ability to coach/mentor others within a PMO team.
• Ability to lead and coach program/project managers in the successful delivery of the developed framework.
• Possess excellent analytical and problem-solving abilities, able to deal effectively with ambiguity and change.
• Demonstrated experience with Agile and Waterfall methodologies and all aspects of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) methodology and tools.
• Proven experience with modern B2B SaaS software development and product launch motions (sales, marketing, legal/compliance, operational readiness, customer engagement, etc.) - Paze specific qualification.