Ai Program Manager Jobs in Illinois (NOW HIRING)

Job Title: AI Technical Project Manager / AI Program Manager Location: Charlotte, NC / Chicago, IL Duration: Contract - 12 months Pay Range: $67.69/hr (W2) Job ID: 407701 About BCforward BCforward is a leading global IT consulting and workforce solutions firm providing services and support to Fortune 500 and government clients. Founded in 1998, BCforward has grown with our customers needs into a full-service business solutions provider. With delivery centers and offices across North America and India, we take pride in building long-term relationships and delivering excellence through innovation, collaboration, and integrity. Job Description We are seeking an experienced IT Program Manager to lead end-to-end planning and execution for AI programs across discovery, prototyping, pilot, and production. The ideal candidate will have strong experience in Agile program management, AI delivery lifecycles, and risk controls and a proven ability to drive cross-functional delivery, ensure Responsible AI governance, and achieve outcome-based results in regulated environments. Responsibilities: Establish and maintain integrated project plans with milestones, dependencies, and critical paths for AI initiatives. Run Agile ceremonies across Scrum and Kanban and adapt to hybrid delivery for model and platform work. Own RAID management with clear owners, due dates, mitigations, and dependency tracking. Coordinate delivery across Product, Engineering, Reliability Engineering, Data, and Compliance functions. Track budgets, vendor engagements, and resourcing and maintain accurate status and forecast reporting. Ensure Responsible AI governance including data privacy, model risk, bias and fairness, explainability, and human-in-the-loop controls. Drive operational readiness for production support including runbooks, incident playbooks, SLAs/SLOs, observability, and ServiceNow Knowledge Management alignment. Partner on release planning, change management, and operational handoffs and lead post-launch retrospectives and continuous improvement. Maintain project artifacts in Jira and Confluence and uphold documentation standards, including JSON-first specifications where applicable. Facilitate stakeholder communications including executive updates, decision logs, and KPI/OKR-based reporting. Support evaluation pipelines such as A/B tests, offline benchmarks, and red-team testing and define acceptance criteria for AI features. Align security and compliance reviews including access controls, audit trails, and policy exceptions with enterprise standards. Required Skills & Qualifications: Project and program management expertise in Agile and hybrid delivery for AI initiatives. Strong stakeholder management and risk control capabilities with clear communication skills. Proficiency with Jira and Confluence and standard PM artifacts including RAID, roadmaps, status, and budget tracking. 7+ years leading complex technology projects and 3+ years delivering AI/ML or LLM-based solutions. Preferred Skills: Experience with GenAI, agentic systems, LangChain or LangGraph, and RAG pipelines. Familiarity with Python, FastAPI integration patterns, vector and relational database basics, and LLM evaluation metrics including quality, safety, latency, and cost. Exposure to LLMOps or MLOps practices including observability, rollback, feature flags, and CI/CD for models. Financial services or regulated industry experience and production support background. Certifications such as PMP, PMI-ACP, or CSM. Why BCforward? At BCforward, we believe in advancing lives and careers. When you join our team, you gain access to: Competitive compensation and benefits. Opportunities for growth with global clients. A supportive, inclusive culture that values innovation and people. Exposure to cutting-edge technologies and projects. About Our Commitment BCforward is an equal opportunity employer. We value diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, or veteran status. Interested? Apply Now! If this sounds like the right opportunity for you, please apply with your most recent resume.