Program Manager Jobs in Palos Heights, IL (NOW HIRING)

Local candidates with Banking Domain, that have handled complex projects.

Role : Program Manager

Location: Chicago, IL

Duration: Long Term

# Job Description: Senior Technical Program Manager (TPM) – Enterprise Integration & Orchestration 

## Role Summary 

The Senior Technical Program Manager (Senior TPM) is accountable for planning, orchestrating, and delivering complex, cross-functional technical programs focused on enterprise-wide integration and orchestration modernization. This role operates at the intersection of technical architecture, platform engineering, and organizational enablement, aligning distributed engineering teams to build a secure, governed, and highly resilient cloud-native integration ecosystem.  

The Senior TPM manages end-to-end program execution from initial discovery through design, proof-of-concept validation, production delivery, and final operational handoff. A primary measure of success for this role is establishing  

operational sovereignty 

—ensuring that client teams are fully trained, enabled, and capable of operating, maintaining, and scaling the modern integration platform independently without perpetual vendor reliance. 

## Core Responsibilities 

### 1. Program Strategy & Phase-Gate Governance 

Translate Strategy into Execution: Convert high-level business modernization objectives into clear program charters, scope boundaries, critical paths, and measurable outcome metrics. 

Establish Operating Models: Operationalize structured program governance cadences (standups, steering committees, and decision registers) tailored to the program's complexity and regulatory compliance profile. 

Execute Phased Delivery Roadmaps: Manage structured, gate-controlled delivery schedules (spanning discovery, target-state design, tooling evaluations, proof-of-concept validations, pilot builds, and documentation phases). 

Executive Visibility: Provide decision-ready status reporting, risk registers, and milestone confidence scoring to technical and business leadership. 

### 2. Technical Program Management & Architectural Discipline 

Target-State Enforcement: Partner with Solutions Architects to enforce strict integration standards and design guardrails (e.g., domain-first API separation, orchestration as routing/coordination without embedded business logic, and contract-first API development). 

Integration Pattern Library Management: Oversee the definition, documentation, and registry of repeatable enterprise integration patterns (such as Saga orchestrators for distributed transactional safety, automated asynchronous exception handling, idempotency barriers, and schema validation registries). 

CI/CD Pipeline Compliance: Ensure automated pipeline gates are established to validate schema lints, contract compliance (e.g., OpenAPI specs), and codebase decoupling before deployment merge. 

### 3. Observability & Controls Integration 

Examination-Ready Observability: Drive the implementation of end-to-end transaction traceability frameworks to satisfy stringent compliance requirements, ensuring distributed systems can reconstruct entire transaction lifecycles using correlation IDs. 

3-Tier Monitoring Foundations: Coordinate platform teams to instrument tracing spans, latency tracking, error metrics, and infrastructure alerts across enterprise monitoring tools (e.g., Datadog, Splunk, CloudWatch, or OpenTelemetry). 

### 4. Enablement, OCM, and Operational Sovereignty 

Continuous Integration of Knowledge (CI/K): Partner with the Transition Management Office (TMO) to run agile knowledge-harvesting feedback loops, translating real-world design decisions and simulated test-environment failures directly into live operational runbooks and training content. 

Multi-Track Learning Paths: Deliver targeted upskilling modules and computer-based training customized for specific personas across Architecture, Developer, Operations, and Governance tracks. 

Reverse Knowledge Transfer (KT): Implement multi-level teach-back evaluation strategies and lab-based dry runs to systematically transition operational responsibility to internal teams. 

Independence Validations: Design and observe live incident-response simulations, multi-availability zone failover drills, and deployment/rollback scenarios executed solely by internal engineering staff to certify self-sufficiency. 

## Technical Skills Required 

### Must-Have Technical Competencies: 

SDLC & Cloud-Native Fluency: Deep familiarity with modern software development lifecycles, containerized container orchestration systems (Kubernetes/EKS/ECS), and serverless architectures. 

Enterprise Integration Patterns: Practical literacy in event-driven architectures, API Gateways, event routers (e.g., Amazon EventBridge, Kafka, or MSK), and messaging queues (SQS FIFO). 

Systems Thinking & Architecture Literacy: Ability to interpret system design blueprints, interface contracts, and data flow topologies to proactively identify scalability bottlenecks and transaction risks. 

Observability & Telemetry Literacy: Strong understanding of distributed tracing, structured logging correlation, and composite metric alerting systems. 

Agile & DevOps Delivery Tooling: Experience managing cross-team backlogs, dependency maps, and pipelines using tools such as Jira, Azure DevOps, or GitHub Actions. 

### Good-to-Have Technical Competencies: 

Automation & Scripting Basics: Basic ability to read or execute automated scripts (e.g., Python, SQL) to pull program telemetry or understand system behavior. 

Policy-as-Code & Linters: Awareness of schema-linting engines (e.g., Spectral) and architectural testing libraries (e.g., ArchUnit). 

Modern Database & Schema Lifecycle: Understanding of database schema evolution, transactional rollbacks, and distributed data transformations. 

## Soft Skills & Behavioral Capabilities 

Influence Without Authority: Proven capability to drive commitments, align divergent engineering teams, and negotiate priority compromises across product lines, platforms, and third-party vendors. 

Executive Communication & Narrative Clarity: Ability to synthesize complex technical execution risks, API latencies, or architectural trade-offs into crisp, decision-ready executive options and business-impact reports. 

Structured Problem Solving: Exceptional analytical skill in performing root-cause analyses on program delays, pipeline failures, or operational readiness gaps, converting lessons learned into durable process changes. 

Ownership Mindset & Bias for Action: Unwavering focus on bridging cross-team gaps, unblocking dependencies, and maintaining program momentum in highly ambiguous, fast-paced environments. 

Calm Under Pressure: Ability to manage rollout windows, incident triage, and executive escalations with a structured, stabilizing presence. 

## Required Experience & Qualifications 

Overall Experience: 8–12+ years of experience delivering robust technical products or platforms within software engineering or IT organizations. 

Program Management Experience: 4–7+ years leading large-scale, cross-functional technical programs involving 3 to 10+ coordinated engineering teams. 

Modernization Background: Demonstrated experience managing platform migrations (e.g., monolith to microservices or on-prem to cloud), enterprise integration modernizations, or complex multi-vendor system rollouts. 

Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Business Administration, Software Engineering, or equivalent practical experience. 

Certifications (Preferred): PMP, Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), SAFe Program Consultant, or foundational Cloud Provider certifications (AWS Cloud Certified).