Staff Program Manager - Engineering Operations

About the Job

Caribou is looking for a Staff-Level Program Manager to directly support the CTO in the execution, management, coordination, and tracking of Technology and Engineering initiatives and overall improve the efficacy of the Technology organization.

In this role you will:

• Support managers with operational structure and alignment to organization and company objectives. Give visibility to CTO on how teams are progressing against stated goals.
• Complement engineering managers’ technical and people focus with a focus on project-delivery and commitments.
• Help drive simplicity through the technology organization by constantly challenging those in technical discussions to seek the simplest solutions.
• Drive a sense of urgency and importance through the organization.
• Support developer productivity team by taking an active role in influencing what gets worked on and ensuring alignment with overall organizational strategy and goals.
• Help product and engineering focus on the right things to build (e.g., does this work get us closer to profitability?) alignment with broader company strategy / goals.
• Align with product leadership and other program managers on how to divide and conquer items including: daily syncs, roadmap planning and review, product delivery and reporting.
• Organizational communication. Elevate how the engineering and product organization is viewed within the company.

About the Role

This is what you will do on a daily basis:

• Engage with a full portfolio of software systems and products in alignment with the business and lead processes to coordinate the planning efforts for both the discovery and delivery aspects.  Help connect teams as they work through dependencies and risks they’ve identified.
• Act in the stead of the CTO in various contexts both with internal-facing and external-facing contexts.
• Drive key initiatives, making sure objectives and scope are defined together with product management and getting cross-functional plans in place. Set up and drive a structure for execution including tracking progress against plans and potential risks and blockers.
• Act as a strategic partner in leading discussions and decisions about expectations, timelines of specific projects including an understanding when decisions will be made, to further invest or to change direction.

About You

You most likely identify with many of these qualities:

• 7+ years of experience from cross-functional environments with engineering, product, design, data science and research.
• Servant leader with superior facilitation and collaboration skills, coaching, and mentoring teams and leaders towards rapidly delivering high impact, high quality software in a sustainable fashion.
• You have understanding and experience with a variety of agile approaches.
• Strong attention to detail and multi-tasking skills.
• You see the bigger picture, are analytical, can quickly grasp what is an actual problem/opportunity and what needs to focus on now.
• An efficient communicator and great at clarifying/simplifying for teams.
• Experienced in discussing and interacting with senior leaders, an influencer with the ability to lead without formal authority.
• Goal focused but also pragmatic, understanding the complexity of working with a multitude of different teams and people.
• You have a flexible approach, responsive to changing business needs.
• Very structured, well organized, operating with accountability and integrity.
• Collaborative mindset; will work across many areas of an organization.
• Flexibility to work with geographically distributed teams.

Everyone at Caribou is a valued team member, and we always strive to live up to our value Take Care of Each Other. Our compensation and benefits package includes: 

• Base salary of starting at $170k annually
• Equity options
• 401k savings program with 3% company contribution
• Generous paid time off including: 20 days accrued PTO per year, 14 annual company holidays, 16-weeks paid parental leave, bereavement leave, and volunteer day.
• Robust wellness benefits including company-paid plans for health, dental, vision, mental health, disability and basic life insurance.
• Optional benefits to suit your individual circumstances such as HSAs, FSAs, supplemental life and medical insurance, and pet insurance.
• Up to $1,000 per year for eligible professional development expenses