Product Engineering & Technical Program Management Portfolio/Region Lead (Director)

Grant Thornton•Newport Beach, CA

15d

About The Position

Grant Thornton is seeking a Product Engineering & Technical Program Management Portfolio/Region Lead to join the team. Approved office locations can be found below. The Product Engineering & Technical Program Management Portfolio / Region Lead defines and leads alignment among product strategy, technical architecture, engineering execution, and cross-team program delivery across Grant Thornton’s internal and external product portfolio. This leader ensures that product engineering and technical program management operate as a cohesive system, delivering scalable, secure, reliable platforms and product capabilities that support the firm’s global strategy. Operating at the executive level, this role leads the product engineering and technical program management functions; establishes the operating model, governance, investment approach, delivery cadence, and performance measures; and provides a clear view of priorities, dependencies, risks, readiness, and outcomes across the portfolio. The role partners with senior leaders across Product, Technology, Architecture, Security, Operations, and the business to make trade-offs, scale reusable capability, and improve execution across geographies.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field.
15+ years of experience in engineering leadership, technical product leadership, technical program management, or a closely related field, including significant experience leading teams.
Proven success leading distributed engineering and technical program organizations at enterprise scale and delivering software products adopted by internal or external users.
Demonstrated experience directing complex, cross-functional programs across multiple engineering teams, product management, design, operations, and business stakeholders.
Deep understanding of modern software delivery practices, including Agile, DevOps, continuous delivery, platform engineering, and flow metrics.
Strong architectural fluency across scalable system design, integrations, security, reliability, and the relationship between technical decisions and delivery risk.
Experience establishing operating models, governance, standards, and performance measures across multiple teams or regions.
Strong strategic judgment in portfolio prioritization, investment allocation, dependency management, and scope or sequencing trade-offs.
Ability to influence executives and align stakeholders across Product, Technology, Architecture, Security, Operations, and the business.
Exceptional executive communication skills, with the ability to translate complex technical and program information into clear decisions and recommendations.
Experience managing and developing technical program managers, scrum masters, engineering leaders, or comparable roles across distributed locations.
Working fluency with AI tools and experience planning AI or machine-learning work where evaluation is iterative, quality is measured statistically, and model, data, cost, and latency constraints affect delivery.

Nice To Haves

Experience delivering enterprise-grade products in professional services or another regulated environment.
Experience with a platform-plus-solutions model and scaling shared capabilities across products, audiences, tenants, or markets.
Experience establishing enterprise engineering standards for observability, security, reliability, experimentation, feature management, and progressive rollout.
Experience using product analytics and adoption measures to evaluate launch outcomes and value realization.
Experience building global delivery models across the United States, India, and Europe and partnering with external engineering vendors.

Responsibilities

Define and execute the enterprise technical vision for product platforms and shared capabilities, aligned with firm objectives, product strategy, and architecture standards.
Lead and develop distributed product engineering, technical program management, and scrum master teams; set expectations, strengthen capabilities, and build a culture of technical excellence, accountability, and continuous improvement.
Establish and evolve the engineering and technical product operating model, including governance, decision rights, planning standards, delivery cadence, and ways of working across regions.
Translate roadmap commitments into sequenced, resourced portfolio and program plans with clear owners, dates, dependencies, risks, and user outcomes.
Lead complex programs across multiple squads and functions from validated concept through build, launch, and stabilization for internal and external users.
Partner with Product, Technology, Architecture, Security, Operations, and business leaders to align roadmaps, standards, investments, and delivery priorities.
Drive portfolio prioritization and investment trade-offs using technical return on investment, cost of delay, capacity, risk, and expected value.
Oversee platform and foundation initiatives, including cloud, data, integration, automation, and AI capabilities, to increase reuse, reduce duplication, and accelerate delivery.
Establish standards for architecture, telemetry, reliability, integration, security, quality, and operational readiness across the product portfolio.
Improve engineering flow by strengthening backlog health, estimation, dependency management, work-in-progress controls, demos, and the removal of systemic impediments.
Set a focused set of measures for delivery health, cycle time, platform stability, quality, adoption, and value realization; provide transparent, executive-ready reporting without creating unnecessary administrative burden.
Own launch and ship readiness, coordinating product, design, support, market, delivery, and operations activities, including enablement, documentation, communications, rollout, rollback, and post-launch stabilization.
Maintain a current, quantified view of portfolio risk and present leaders with clear options and implications for scope, timing, cost, quality, and outcomes.
Guide technical staffing strategy, vendor and outsourced delivery relationships, skills development, and capability maturity across engineering and technical program management roles.
Plan and govern AI-enabled product work using appropriate discovery, evaluation, data, model, quality, cost, and latency considerations, and apply AI tools to improve planning, risk detection, status synthesis, and reporting.
Represent Product Engineering and Technical Program Management in executive forums, communicating decisions, trade-offs, risks, progress, and recommendations clearly.
Operate effectively within a global delivery model, using distributed teams and time-zone coverage to improve collaboration and execution.