Senior Manager Program Management

Aurora•Coppell, TX

13d•$176,000 - $213,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Aurora is seeking a Senior Manager of Program Management for their Development Test Operations. This role involves managing a team of Program Managers who are embedded with engineering groups. The Senior Manager will be responsible for setting program vision, coordinating the portfolio, and establishing strong governance and standards for the PM team. The ideal candidate will have sufficient engineering/development workflow knowledge to critically assess PM decisions, resolve technical escalations, and represent the team effectively with Engineering leadership.

Requirements

7+ years of experience in Program Management, Project Management, or Technical Operations, including 5+ years directly managing a team of Program/Project Managers.
Demonstrated experience building or standardizing a reporting and operating cadence across a distributed team, replacing informal coordination with repeatable process.
Strong technical fluency across software and hardware development workflows, with the ability to translate engineering plans and progress into concrete, executable field test programs.
Proven experience managing relationships and expectations with both Engineering leadership and Planning/Portfolio stakeholders simultaneously.
Experience supporting technical or development programs in a cross-functional, fast-paced environment with shifting priorities.
Track record of driving change management and process improvement across a team, not just an individual workstream.

Nice To Haves

Experience in autonomous vehicle, automotive, robotics, logistics, or similarly complex operational environments.
Exposure to a broad range of test types - field/operational testing, software/feature validation, and platform bring-up or hardware readiness - and comfort moving between them.
Familiarity with the software development lifecycle and how development milestones (builds, releases, feature rollouts) map to test scheduling and readiness across varied test types.
Experience building or owning dashboards/reporting tools that aggregate program status across multiple sub-teams.

Responsibilities

Own strategic planning and alignment for the team, including setting the vision for program management, coordinating test programs/portfolio and resourcing, and setting governance and standards.
Manage, coach, and develop a team of Program Managers, establishing consistent operating norms to increase program quality.
Own program-level planning and quality across all engineering areas the team supports (lane and network expansion, track testing, road testing, and other development test workstreams), ensuring every initiative has clear scope, description, and need-by dates, every ticket has a clear, executable test procedure, and operations is receiving high-quality testing requests.
Ensure every PM operates as the single point of contact with their engineering area, with clear communication on timelines and needs to/from Engineering and Planning; own the defined escalation path for conflicts and ensure PMs know when to use it.
Manage resources, budget, and track dependencies.
Share test program risks and mitigations with relevant stakeholders.
Review test execution and QA quality trends across the team, especially on blocked tickets, and drive root-cause process fixes rather than one-off firefighting, closing the feedback loop with both Engineering and Operations.
Drive process improvement by moving the team onto standardized workflows, supporting metrics development, and establishing a weekly reporting cadence.