IT Engineering Program Manager

Ford Motor Company • Contract • Dearborn, Michigan, United States • $93,607 - $133,016 / year • 1m ago

Role summary / purpose

Success as an Engineering Program Manager requires someone who brings structure to ambiguity and drives delivery clarity across teams. You thrive in a fast-paced environment, build strong partnerships with engineering and program leaders, and ensure work is prioritized and executed with discipline. You are comfortable operating at both the strategic and tactical levels: shaping what should be worked on, aligning cross-functional stakeholders, and ensuring delivery plans, risks, and dependencies are visible and actively managed. You communicate crisply, writing clear leadership updates and facilitating alignment when tradeoffs are required.

Key responsibilities

Help drive the system of delivery and ensure domain work is focused on the most important outcomes aligned to strategy and planned/governed consistently.
Establish the structures and mechanisms that enable predictable delivery: backlog structure, planning artifacts, governance cadence, and reporting hygiene.
Challenge and de-prioritize work that does not support the strategy or agreed priorities in partnership with Technical Program Manager, Product, and leadership.
Co-own the domain backlog structure, planning, and delivery plan including scope, milestones, and dependencies within the strategic frame set by leadership.
Prioritize within the domain with Engineering Manager input to ensure capacity is focused on the highest-value work.
Drive clarity for cross-team sequencing and integration planning so commitments are realistic and well-understood.
Maintain accurate internal risk and dependency registers; actively drive resolution, mitigation plans, and escalation paths.
Keep project artifacts and dashboards up to date so domain and program status is trustworthy and comparable.
Provide clear, timely communications to stakeholders on progress, risks, and changes.
Ensure work has clear acceptance criteria and a defined value/outcome.
At completion, validate with Engineering and leadership whether acceptance criteria were met and whether the intended value was delivered.
Participate and provide key inputs to the cross-functional work intake and discovery process with context to all impacted functions within your domain.
Apply and help evolve common standards for discovery, planning, and delivery.
Ensure the domain integrates into the broader operating model using shared templates and cadences.

Requirements – education & experience

4 years in IT
1 year in Program Management
Expert-level Project Management experience
Senior Associate level

Required skills

Build strong partnerships across engineering, program, product, design, systems, testing, operations, and quality functions.
Drive alignment through clear tradeoffs, documented decisions, and transparent plans.
Use data and delivery signals—risks, dependencies, throughput/health indicators—to inform priorities and leadership actions.