Senior Technical Program Manager

Senior Technical Program Manager

Senior Technical Program Manager:

Position Summary:

Cornerstone OnDemand is seeking an experienced Senior Technical Program Manager to lead highly strategic, complex, cross-functional technical programs that drive our product and platform evolution. In this role, you will partner closely with Engineering, Product, Architecture, DevOps, and Executive Leadership to deliver large-scale initiatives across multiple engineering organizations.

You will provide leadership beyond program execution by driving technical alignment, improving delivery excellence, managing organizational dependencies, influencing engineering strategy, and enabling predictable execution across multiple concurrent initiatives.

In this role, you will...

Strategic Program Leadership

• Own the end-to-end delivery of multiple large-scale technical programs spanning engineering, product, infrastructure, security, and business organizations.
• Develop program strategy, execution roadmaps, governance models, and success metrics aligned with business objectives.
• Drive quarterly and annual planning across multiple product and engineering teams.
• Establish program governance including executive reviews, steering committees, milestone tracking, and operational cadences.
• Lead portfolio-level prioritization, balancing business value, engineering capacity, technical debt, and strategic investments.
• Drive organizational alignment on priorities while proactively identifying delivery risks and recommending mitigation strategies.
• Manage competing priorities, scope changes, resource constraints, and cross-functional trade-offs.
• Build scalable program management frameworks that improve execution maturity across engineering organizations.
• Lead post-program reviews and continuously improve delivery processes using metrics and lessons learned.

Technical Leadership

• Partner with Engineering Directors, Principal Engineers, Architects, and Product Leaders to understand architecture, system dependencies, and technical risks.
• Drive cross-platform initiatives including cloud migrations, platform modernization, distributed systems, API evolution, infrastructure upgrades, and engineering transformation programs.
• Facilitate architecture reviews and technical design discussions to ensure alignment across multiple teams.
• Coordinate engineering execution across microservices, platform services, cloud infrastructure, DevOps, Security, QA, and SRE organizations.
• Ensure release readiness through coordinated planning, dependency management, and operational preparedness.
• Champion engineering best practices including Agile at Scale, DevOps, CI/CD, observability, reliability engineering, and continuous delivery.
• Identify technical bottlenecks impacting delivery and partner with engineering leadership to improve development velocity.

Executive Stakeholder Management

• Serve as the primary communication bridge between engineering, product management, business leadership, and executive stakeholders.
• Deliver executive-ready status reports, dashboards, and decision documents highlighting program health, milestones, risks, dependencies, and business impact.
• Translate complex technical concepts into business outcomes for non-technical audiences.
• Drive executive decision-making through structured analysis, data-driven recommendations, and risk assessments.
• Influence cross-functional leaders without direct authority to achieve organizational alignment.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Drive alignment between Product Roadmaps, Engineering Capacity, Architecture Strategy, and Business Priorities.
• Coordinate execution across globally distributed engineering teams.
• Manage cross-team dependencies, resource planning, release planning, and roadmap synchronization.
• Foster strong partnerships across Engineering, Product, Security, Infrastructure, Customer Success, and Operations.

You've Got What It Takes If You Have...

Experience:

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or related discipline (or equivalent practical experience).
• 12+ years of experience in Technical Program Management, Engineering Program Management, or Software Engineering.
• 6+ years of prior software engineering, technical lead, or systems architecture experience.
• Proven success leading enterprise-scale, cross-functional software delivery programs involving multiple engineering organizations.
• Experience managing strategic initiatives with executive visibility and organizational impact.

Technical Expertise

Strong understanding of distributed systems, cloud-native architecture, SaaS platforms, and enterprise software development.
Hands-on understanding of:

Azure (preferred), AWS, or GCP
Microservices architecture
REST APIs
Event-driven systems
CI/CD pipelines
Kubernetes and containers
DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering
Ability to understand architecture diagrams, system designs, technical specifications, and code reviews sufficiently to identify delivery risks.
Strong knowledge of Agile, Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, or other scaled Agile frameworks.
Expertise with Jira, Azure DevOps, Confluence, Smartsheet, MS Project, and program reporting tools.

Leadership & Communication

• Outstanding executive communication and presentation skills.
• Demonstrated ability to influence senior engineering and product leaders without direct authority.
• Strong conflict resolution, negotiation, and decision facilitation skills.
• Exceptional analytical, organizational, and strategic planning abilities.
• Strong ownership mindset with a bias toward execution and continuous improvement.
• Experience mentoring Technical Program Managers and helping scale program management practices.

Nice to Have:

• Experience in SaaS/enterprise product development environments.
• Exposure to AI/ML programs and their unique delivery challenges.
• Familiarity with talent management, HR tech, or learning management domains.

#LI-Onsite

Our Culture:

Our mission is to empower people, businesses and communities. A culture created less by what we do and more by who we are. When people ask what our team is about, we point to our core values: champion customer success, bring our best, achieve together, get stuff done, and innovate every day. We're always on the lookout for new, curious and capable people who can help us achieve our goal and we are seeking diversity in the people who join our team. We want to make sure that our company reflects the demographic of our customers, clients, and the communities in which we operate. So if you want to work for a friendly, global, inclusive and innovative company, we'd love to meet you!

What We Do:

Cornerstone is a premier people development company. We believe people can achieve anything when they have the right development and growth opportunities. We offer organizations the technology, content, expertise and specialized focus to help them realize the potential of their people. Featuring comprehensive recruiting, personalized learning, modern training content, development-driven performance management and holistic employee data management and insights, Cornerstone’s people development solutions are successfully used by more than 100 million+ people in 180+ countries and in nearly 50 languages.

Cornerstone takes special care to ensure the security and privacy of the data of its users.

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