Technical Program Manager

What you will do daily

• Act as the focus point for collaboration with business and technical teams to ensure delivery of world-class solutions with a focus on security, scalability, and reliability.
• Anticipate bottlenecks, provide escalation management, anticipate and make intelligent compromises to balance the business needs against technical constraints.
• Plan and manage multiple complex initiatives in parallel.
• Use your technical expertise to identify and remove ambiguity in both the business need and technical plan.
• Optimize technical resources for delivery of the business priorities.
• Identify, assess, track, and mitigate issues and risks to the business initiatives at multiple levels.
• Assists the teams with planning and prioritizing software development projects, providing expert knowledge and mentoring of project management methodology approaches, techniques, and tools.
• Maintains an overall view of all work going on within the teams.
• Communicate project issues and status in concise, accurate, and professional manner.
• Continuously improve our best practices for solution delivery across multiple teams.
• Build and maintain aggressive delivery schedules that account for multiple layers of dependencies, numerous constraints, and differing technical approaches.

The experience you will need

• 7+ years of progressively responsible experience in a technical software program management, PMO, and portfolio management experience
• A background in DevOps engineering, especially as an SRE
• Demonstrated ability to handle complicated, high-profile projects, including managing and driving resolution for technical problems
• Passionate commitment to empowering teams meet delivery goals
• Proven track record of influencing multiple levels of stakeholders
• Highly organized with excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Sense of ownership with a hands-on approach
• Demonstrated success in leading and driving continuous improvement efforts
• This could be a project to automate a repetitive task, improve incident response time, or streamline a troubleshooting process

Core Skills & Competencies

• Understanding that the key to successful project management is strong relationships
• Highly autonomous and pragmatic
• Comfortable in dealing with change and complexity, actively seeks out and eradicates ambiguity
• Self-confident enough to challenge the status quo as well as to receive feedback
• Leadership: you take the initiative and demonstrate your ability to lead a subject from the beginning to the end
• Ability to lead change of infrastructure and work with employees to adapt to change
• Valuing "done" over "perfect"

Technical Expertise

• System-Level Thinking: deep architectural views of how different systems and components interact with each other to provide a service to our internal customers. This is about seeing the "big picture" of the IT infrastructure, not just a single endpoint
• Data Analysis: passion for analyzing available data and system metrics (e.g., using tools like Datadog, Splunk) to identify trends, pain points, and areas for improvement, then prioritize those. If you don’t have the logs for an answer, you know the person who does
• Automation and Scripting: familiar with at least one scripting language (e.g., Python, PowerShell) to automate tasks, create diagnostic tools, and improve operational efficiency
• Ability to develop project plans from ideas, then break those plans into manageable pieces, with clearly-defined and scoped milestones, risk registers, and oversee the delivery
• Knowledge of scrum methodologies, agile project management, and release (program increment) scheduling techniques for DevOps teams

Leadership & Influence

• Strategic Communication: Excellent written and verbal English communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences, including senior leadership and customers
• Proactive and Self-Driven: A self-starter who takes ownership of issues and actively seeks out opportunities to improve processes and prevent future problems
• Consensus Building: The ability to lead and influence diverse technical solution teams, building consensus across multiple viewpoints and priorities. High judgement, maturity, negotiation skills, influence without authority, and analytical talent are essential to success

Why You Will Love It Here

• Our culture and mission set us apart. We have a dynamic work culture that values respect and kindness and embraces the right to fail (and get right back up again!). 
• Great people make a great company. We value people skills as much as technical skills and strive to keep things friendly while still being passionate leaders in our domains. 
• We have a flexible work policy that includes 3 days in-office and 2 days work-from-home each week for those located near our office locations; some locations such as Dubai, India, Japan and Australia operate fully remotely.
• We have a growth mindset. We love learning and believe continuous education is critical to our success. In an ever-changing industry, new skills are necessary, and we're happy to help our team acquire them.
• As the leader in our field, our products and services are as strong as our internal team members.
• We embrace transparency with regular meetings, cascading messages and updates on the growth and success of our organization.

Benefits of Working with Sonar:

• Pension Scheme: 1st Pillar (Unterstützungskasse): Automatic, financed by Sonar, 3% of gross salary.
• Pension Scheme:2nd Pillar (bAV): Voluntary, 15% contribution by Sonar from social security savings.
• Public transport reimbursement of 60% for annual subscription.
• We encourage usage of our robust time-off allocations with 28 PTO days for our employees based out of the Geneva region, plus additional days based on seniority and circumstances.
• Generous discretionary Company Growth Bonus, paid annually.  Global workforce with employees in 20+ countries representing 35+ unique nationalities.
• We have an annual kick-off somewhere in the world where we meet to build relationships and goals for the company.