Senior Manager, Program Management

Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd•Miami, FL

2d•Onsite

About The Position

Journey with us! Combine your career goals and sense of adventure by joining our exciting team of employees. Royal Caribbean Group is pleased to offer a competitive compensation and benefits package, and excellent career development opportunities, each offering unique ways to explore the world. We are proud to be the vacation-industry leader with global brands — including Royal Caribbean International, Celebrity Cruises and Silversea Cruises — the most innovative fleet and private destinations, and the best people. Together, we are dedicated to turning the vacation of a lifetime into a lifetime of vacations for our guests. The Royal Caribbean Group’s AI & Analytics Team has an exciting career opportunity for a full time Senior Manager, Program Management reporting to the Senior Director, AI Engineering. The position is onsite and based in Miami, Florida. The position is also not eligible for work authorization sponsorship. Position Overview: We are seeking a Senior Technical Program Manager to lead program delivery for the Gen AI Center of Excellence (CoE) at Royal Caribbean Group. This is a senior, cross-functional role accountable for the end-to-end lifecycle of our Gen AI portfolio - from business intake and use case qualification through solution design, custom application development, enterprise deployment, and post-production support. The successful candidate will own the operating rhythm of a CoE that supports multiple brands and business units simultaneously. You will manage a growing demand pipeline against constrained engineering capacity, bring transparency to the portfolio through disciplined backlog and program management, and make the demand-versus-capacity case that drives investment decisions. You will work across Data Engineers, AI/ML Engineers, Data Scientists, Solution Architects, Platform Engineering, Information Security, Legal, and the Enterprise Data and AI Governance Office. Beyond delivery, you will serve as the operational backbone of the AI Ambassador program - our federated network of business-unit representatives who surface use cases, drive adoption, and forecast AI tool demand and spend across their organizations. You will also own the commercial discipline of the portfolio: tracking AI tool licensing and consumption forecasts, managing cost-to-build against cost-to-run, and ensuring every initiative has a defensible total cost of ownership. This role is semi-technical. You are expected to hold your own in architecture discussions on agent frameworks, retrieval-augmented generation, model selection, and platform trade-offs - and to translate those trade-offs into executive-ready decisions.

Requirements

Minimum of 8 years in technical program management, product management, or engineering delivery leadership, with at least 3 years leading AI/ML or Gen AI initiatives.
Demonstrated experience managing a multi-initiative portfolio with competing stakeholders and constrained engineering capacity.
Track record of taking Gen AI or advanced analytics solutions from concept through enterprise production deployment — not pilots alone.
Experience establishing intake, demand management, and prioritization processes in an environment where they did not previously exist.
Experience managing technology budgets, vendor relationships, and software licensing or consumption forecasts.
Experience operating within enterprise security, data governance, and compliance frameworks.
Reasonable technical depth in the Gen AI solution lifecycle — prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, agent architectures, evaluation and accuracy measurement, model selection, and cost/performance trade-offs.
Ability to engage credibly with engineers on architecture and with executives on investment, and to translate fluently between the two.
Exceptional written and verbal communication; able to produce executive-ready material without hand-holding.
Proven ability to bring structure and predictability to ambiguous, fast-moving environments.
Strong analytical and financial literacy — comfortable building forecasts, TCO models, and capacity analyses.
Skilled in Agile delivery frameworks (Scrum, Kanban, SAFe) and in scaling them pragmatically rather than dogmatically.
High degree of ownership; operates with minimal direction and drives outcomes across teams they do not manage.
Bachelor’s degree in technology or engineering fields - or a related field (or equivalent experience).

Responsibilities

Own the Gen AI intake process end to end — serve as the front door for business requests across all brands and business units, from initial acknowledgment through qualification, sizing, and disposition.
Run preliminary use case discovery sessions with requesting stakeholders, extract technical and business requirements, and bring structured, decision-ready information back to engineering teams.
Establish and enforce JIRA as the single source of truth for all Gen AI work — intake requests, custom development, platform initiatives, and production support.
Maintain a transparent, prioritized portfolio backlog that gives leadership real visibility into committed work, aging demand, and capacity constraints.
Build and present the demand-versus-capacity analysis that supports business cases for additional engineering resources and platform investment.
Manage delivery of multiple concurrent Gen AI programs — custom agent applications, conversational and data bot solutions, Copilot Studio agents, and platform capability releases.
Own program plans, milestones, dependencies, and critical path across engineering, platform, data, security, and business stakeholders.
Drive release readiness: user acceptance testing, evaluation and accuracy benchmarking, security review, production deployment approvals, and hypercare.
Identify and remove blockers proactively; escalate with a recommendation, not just a problem.
Own the product roadmap for the Gen AI application portfolio, balancing net-new use cases against platform hardening and technical debt.
Partner with Solution Architects and engineering leads to define solution approach, make build-versus-buy recommendations, and ensure new applications are built on shared platform components rather than one-off stacks.
Define success criteria, evaluation methodology, and measurable business outcomes for every solution before development begins.
Drive adoption and post-deployment value realization; sunset or rework solutions that are not delivering against their business case.
Serve as the operational lead for the AI Ambassador program — the federated network of business-unit representatives across Hotel Operations, Commercial, Revenue Management, Sales, Marketing, Expeditions, Finance, Tour Operations, and other functions.
Run the cadence with Ambassadors: use case pipeline reviews, adoption tracking, feedback loops, and enablement.
Consolidate and validate annual AI tool demand and cost forecasts submitted by each Ambassador organization and reconcile departmental submissions into an enterprise-level forecast.
Translate Ambassador-sourced ideas into qualified intake items, closing the loop so the business sees where their submissions land.
Own the AI tool licensing and consumption forecast across the enterprise portfolio — seat-based and usage-based — and track actual spend against forecast.
Apply cost-to-build versus cost-to-run discipline to every initiative, ensuring architecture and approach decisions account for long-term platform support and maintenance cost, not just delivery cost.
Partner with engineering on cost optimization levers: model routing and tiering, caching, right-sizing compute, and consumption governance.
Work with the internal cost tracking application to provide departmental visibility, chargeback-grade attribution, and early warning on consumption trends.
Support vendor evaluation and negotiation for Gen AI platforms and tooling, including total cost of ownership modeling and exit-cost analysis.
Ensure every Gen AI solution clears the required governance gates — Information Security review, Legal approval, Third Party Risk assessment, and Enterprise Data and AI Governance Office review — before production release.
Enforce data classification and handling requirements across the portfolio, with particular rigor where solutions touch Confidential or Restricted data, including guest and employee personal data.
Maintain and evolve the CoE's standard operating procedures for agent release, evaluation, and change management.
Identify program, technical, and compliance risks early; maintain a live risk register with owners and mitigation plans.
Serve as the primary interface between the Gen AI CoE and senior business and technology leadership.
Produce concise, decision-oriented executive reporting on portfolio status, delivery health, capacity, adoption, and spend.
Set and manage expectations transparently — including saying no, or not yet, with a clear rationale.
Represent the CoE in enterprise architecture, governance, and investment forums.