Senior Program Manager

Napier AI • Wilmington, DE

3d • Onsite

About The Position

Napier AI's platform analyzes transactions and customers in real-time using AI and smart analytics to help financial institutions detect and prevent financial crime, such as money laundering. The company fosters a culture of collaboration, innovation, and opportunity, promoting equality and creativity. The Senior Program Manager role is crucial for leading Napier AI's most complex and high-value enterprise delivery programs, particularly for Tier 1 bank implementations. This role involves portfolio leadership of strategic Tier 1 accounts as the business scales. These programs operate under strict regulatory and contractual deadlines, involve complex multi-party governance, and are subject to executive scrutiny. The successful candidate will be expected to quickly establish authority, restore delivery confidence, manage commercial aspects, and ensure successful go-live. This is a senior, customer-facing position with end-to-end program accountability, serving as the primary senior delivery contact with the client's program director and executive sponsor. The role requires holding internal teams (Product, Engineering, Platform, Professional Services) accountable to commitments to ensure customer value realization.

Requirements

• 12+ years leading large-scale enterprise software delivery programs, with at least 5 years at senior program director or equivalent level.
• Direct financial crime compliance domain experience: AML, KYC, Transaction Monitoring, Sanctions Screening, or Case Management platforms. Deep and current experience is required.
• Delivered at least one enterprise implementation into a Tier 1 or systemic bank in the UK, EU, or US, chairing steering committees at C-1 level.
• Proven turnaround experience: taken over a live enterprise program mid-flight, restored client confidence, re-baselined credibly, and landed a successful outcome.
• Cloud-based enterprise SaaS platform delivery experience, ideally including hyperscaler-hosted environments (Azure, AWS, or GCP).
• Multi-vendor program experience across client, primary vendor, hyperscaler, and system integrator.
• Strong commercial and contractual instincts: has run defensive change control, held scope, defended margin, and defeated attempts to reclassify enhancements as defects.
• Experience of programs with regulatory or contractual hard deadlines (go/no-go gates, DORA, PRA/FCA supervisory dates, or equivalent).
• Presence and credibility at C-1 and C-suite client levels.
• You bring calm authority and structured judgement to programs under pressure.
• You are equally comfortable in a technical defect triage, a commercial change control meeting, and a bank executive steering committee.
• You know when to push and when to protect, and you are willing to hold uncomfortable positions internally to protect the commercial and delivery outcome.
• You do not need consensus to act.
• You do need clarity of accountability, direct access to executive decision-making, and the trust to run your program.

Nice To Haves

• Experience of escrow, source-code deposit, or equivalent third-party regulatory instruments in a live client engagement.
• Experience across multiple geographic regions (EMEA, Americas, APAC).
• Program management certifications (MSP, PgMP, PMP, Prince2) - useful, but not a substitute for the experience above.
• Experience in Private Equity-backed software companies operating to a defined value creation plan.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end delivery of Napier's largest enterprise programs, including Tier 1 National and European bank engagements.
• Establish and run program governance: steering committees, executive status reviews, RAID discipline, decision logs.
• Define and defend the acceptance criteria for go-live and any regulatory or contractual milestone.
• Coordinate delivery across Napier's Professional Services, Product, Engineering, Platform, Support, and Customer Success functions.
• Act as the single senior Napier delivery contact with the client's program director, delivery leads, and executive sponsors.
• Chair steering committees and executive status forums with authority and credibility.
• Prevent client escalations bypassing program governance.
• Represent Napier at client executive escalations, industry regulator interactions where relevant, and third-party (hyperscaler, SI) governance.
• Own program P&L, forecast, and margin.
• Run formal change control against every scope movement, defect classification, and delivery obligation.
• Defend Napier against uncapped commitments, one-sided release triggers, and unbounded acceptance criteria.
• Hold the defect versus change request line: no product commitment leaves Napier without your sign-off.
• Escalate commercial and contractual risk to the CCO before it becomes a client-facing position.
• Maintain the end-to-end program plan, dependency map, and critical path.
• Own the risk register and drive mitigations with named accountable owners.
• Establish and maintain go/no-go readiness assessment against agreed criteria.
• Drive continuous improvement in Napier's delivery methodology from evidence in the field.
• Manage the operational side of any escrow, source-code deposit, or equivalent regulatory instrument on your programs, working with Napier Legal, Engineering, and the third-party agent.
• Manage client expectations on trigger events, deposit content, and verification cycles.
• Ensure customers achieve successful implementation, adoption, and business value realisation.
• Manage a clean transition from delivery into Customer Success and Support with complete documentation and no orphaned commitments.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed