Program Manager

Title: Program Manager

Location: Worcester, MA (Hybrid)

Type: Contract

Overview:

• 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.