Program specialist Jobs in Worcester, MA

Program Manager

Location: Worcester, MA (Hybrid- Need local candidates)

We are seeking an experienced and highly organized Program Manager to lead and oversee production support operations across multiple applications, platforms, vendors, and cross-functional teams. This role will be responsible for driving operational excellence through incident management, SLA compliance, security and risk mitigation, technical debt governance, metrics reporting, client engagement, and end-to-end coordination among internal and external stakeholders. The ideal candidate will serve as the primary operational leader, ensuring system stability, service reliability, continuous improvement, and effective communication between business stakeholders, technology teams, and third-party vendors.

Key Responsibilities

Production Support & Incident Management

• Lead production support operations across multiple applications and services.
• Establish and manage incident management processes, ensuring timely triage, escalation, resolution, and communication.
• Drive Major Incident Management (MIM) activities and coordinate war room sessions during critical outages.
• Conduct root cause analysis (RCA) reviews and track corrective and preventive actions.
• Monitor incident trends and identify improvement opportunities to reduce recurring issues.
• Ensure adherence to operational support procedures and best practices.

Service Level Agreement (SLA) Management

• Define, monitor, and govern operational SLAs, OLAs, and KPIs.
• Track service performance against agreed targets and drive remediation plans for SLA breaches.
• Develop and implement service improvement plans to enhance customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.
• Provide regular SLA performance reports to leadership and clients.

Technical Debt Management

• Establish governance processes for identification and prioritization of technical debt.
• Partner with engineering and architecture teams to create remediation roadmaps.
• Track technical debt backlog and ensure alignment with business priorities.
• Drive continuous improvements to system stability, maintainability, and performance.

Security Vulnerability & Risk Management

• Coordinate vulnerability assessment, remediation, and compliance activities across application and infrastructure teams.
• Track security findings from scans, audits, and assessments.
• Ensure timely resolution of critical and high-risk vulnerabilities.
• Collaborate with cybersecurity teams to support compliance, audit readiness, and risk mitigation initiatives.
• Monitor operational risks and develop mitigation strategies.

Metrics, Reporting & Governance

• Define and maintain operational dashboards and executive-level reporting.
• Analyze performance metrics including:
• Incident volumes
• Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA)
• Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR)
• SLA adherence
• Availability and uptime
• Technical debt reduction
• Vulnerability remediation status
• Release quality metrics
• Present operational insights and recommendations to leadership.
• Establish governance routines, review meetings, and performance tracking mechanisms.

Client & Stakeholder Management

• Act as the primary point of contact for operational and production support matters.
• Build strong relationships with business stakeholders and clients.
• Communicate service health, risks, escalations, and improvement initiatives.
• Facilitate regular operational reviews and executive status meetings.
• Manage customer expectations and drive issue resolution to completion.

Cross-Team & Vendor Coordination

• Coordinate activities across development, infrastructure, security, QA, DevOps, and support teams.
• Manage relationships with third-party vendors and managed service providers.
• Ensure vendor accountability for service commitments and deliverables.
• Lead cross-functional dependencies and facilitate issue resolution across organizational boundaries.
• Drive alignment among geographically distributed and matrixed teams.

Continuous Improvement & Operational Excellence

• Identify process improvement opportunities and implement best practices.
• Support automation initiatives that improve service reliability and operational efficiency.
• Drive ITIL-aligned service management practices.
• Lead post-incident reviews and ensure lessons learned are incorporated into future processes.
• Foster a culture of accountability, continuous improvement, and customer focus.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, or related field
• 8+ years of experience in IT Program Management, Service Delivery, Production Support, or Operations Management. Strong experience managing large-scale production support environments. Proven experience with incident management, problem management, and change management processes
• 8+ years of Experience managing multiple cross-functional teams and vendors. Strong understanding of application support, cloud platforms, infrastructure, and software delivery lifecycles.
• 8+ years of Experience with operational dashboards, KPI reporting, and executive communications. Excellent stakeholder management and client-facing communication skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• ITIL Foundation or ITIL Managing Professional certification.
• Experience with Agile, Scrum, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices.
• Familiarity with ServiceNow, AppDynamics, or other monitoring tools.
• Experience in regulated environments and security compliance frameworks.