Senior Technical Program Manager

Zuora is looking for an experienced and entrepreneurial Technical Program Manager (TPM) to join the Global Technical Program Management team supporting Product & Technology. TPMs wear many hats in R&D programs, from Deliver Managers leading up complex, strategic programs to Center of Excellence leaders defining the delivery process, tooling and operating models to take the organization to the next level.

This individual should be a highly motivated, strategic thinker who can guide, inspire, coach, and mentor our engineering teams and who is also comfortable digging into the details. The TPM must be extremely organized, with solid strategic planning, resource allocation and outcome-based measurement skills. They must be able to balance competing priorities, have demonstrated project management experience, and approach challenges with flexibility and a positive approach.

The ideal candidate has a love for the craft of program management in a servant leader role and can operate in a process development role, portfolio management role, program management role and scrum master role with the ability to identify the best role to suit the assignment, team or project and the flexibility to adjust in real time.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Drive programs through all phases of the Program Management Lifecycle, including requirements definition, functional and technical design, quality strategy definition, estimation, planning, tracking, risk management, release readiness, documentation, material program changes, key decisions and cross team dependencies.
• Create an operating model that aligns to standard scrum calendar and release trains to track committed work (projects, features, stories, milestones) and release content with an emphasis on iterative delivery.
• Promote scrum team adoption of standards, best practices and process adherence for the best possible, highest quality delivery experience for customers and stakeholders.
• Proactively work to remove obstacles and enable forward momentum and progress. Identify and manage issue escalations and provide support to teams balancing competing priorities.
• Ensure systems and tools are maintained to provide objective, transparent, accurate, timely status updates and program summaries to stakeholders including scope/schedule/quality risks, project status, resource allocation and customer impact.
• Actively drive the enhancement of project management processes, tooling and templates to improve the operating model maturity of a scaling product ecosystem and transforming technology organization
• Perform project evaluations and transform lessons learned to actionable improvements.

Experience and Qualifications

• Direct work experience in a technical program management capacity to drive large, complex technical initiatives including all aspects of process development and execution.
• Solid project management background in commercial software development and delivery in SaaS environment; no less than 8 years experience as a project management professional with at least 3 years experience as Scrum Master and at least 2 years operating in a micro-service architecture and a micro-service software development environment.
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering or experience in a related technical discipline.
• Ability to crisply articulate project status at executive level and team level both verbally and with program dashboards, reports and communication.
• Ability to identify and analyze issues and summarize problem statements and proactively work across the organization to drive issues to closure.
• Ability to work independently; self-motivated; self-starter. Can operate with some level of ambiguity; knows when to dig in, do research, pull information together to drive issues to ground.
• Extensive planning experience of complex systems; can demonstrate deep understanding of incremental delivery models.
• Excellent project planning skills; can drive teams through all stages of project initiation, concept, high level planning, detail estimation, etc to build project implementation and delivery plans.
• Proven track record of managing multiple major and concurrent projects/programs executed through multiple geographic locations involving cross functional teams
• Mentor team of junior & associate TPMs to build solid TPM discipline & skillset in Zuora
• Detail oriented; strives for excellence of quality and accuracy of data in all deliverables.
• Strong teamwork; team building skills and ability to influence; builds relationships/community within teams.
• High energy; desire to constantly learn; thrives in a rapidly changing environment.
• Direct experience working with software engineering leadership, technical teams and individual contributors
• Knowledge of professional software engineering practices for the full software development life cycle for enterprise commercial software delivery; experience in release management; change control and quality assurance processes.
• Extensive experience driving change and fostering a continuous process improvement culture; previous experience with process development, process transformation leadership with a proven track record of rolling out program management concepts to teams; via templates, processes, tooling, methodologies.
• Demonstrated success leading large technology transformational initiatives with enterprise level impact via business process definition and operationalization.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
• Prior JIRA Cloud experience preferred

Preferred Qualifications

• JIRA Cloud & Confluence Cloud experience
• PMP desired (if not certified; plan/desire to be certified)
• CSM desired
• Experience with micro service/SOA architecture, AWS or Public cloud experience;
• Billing, Payment, Commerce, Platform, DevOps system/app experience
• Experience with rapid release; multiple release train delivery and change orchestration
• Prior experience as a software developer or quality assurance engineer a plus
• Experience leading organizational transformation initiatives