Program Lead

The Program Lead is responsible for leading, developing, and coordinating high-performing teams to successfully deliver program objectives. This role provides day-to-day leadership across multidisciplinary teams, ensuring team members understand priorities, have the resources and support needed to succeed, and remain aligned around customer and organizational goals.

The Program Lead serves as the connection point between team members, customers, functional leadership, and senior management. Candidate must have strong people leadership, communication, coaching, conflict resolution, and organizational skills, combined with the ability to maintain accountability for program delivery.

Primary Duties:

• Lead and develop teams: Set clear expectations, provide coaching and feedback, manage performance, and foster employee growth and engagement.
• Manage staffing and resources: Align skills and capacity with program needs; support recruiting, onboarding, workforce planning, and succession planning.
• Drive team execution: Translate program priorities into actionable goals, coordinate work across teams, track commitments, and remove barriers to delivery.
• Build accountability: Establish ownership for results, monitor performance, recognize strong contributions, and address performance issues constructively.
• Strengthen communication and collaboration: Maintain effective team operating rhythms, facilitate open communication, and resolve conflicts across individuals and teams.
• Manage customers and stakeholders: Represent the team to customers and leadership, communicate priorities and risks, manage expectations, and advocate for necessary resources.
• Ensure program performance: Oversee schedules, deliverables, staffing, budgets, risks, quality, and compliance while empowering team members to own execution.
• Build organizational capability: Improve team structures and processes, develop future leaders, identify skill gaps, and prepare the workforce to support program and organizational growth.

• Must be a US Citizen and have an active TS/SCI clearance.
• Demonstrated experience leading and managing multidisciplinary teams, with the ability to motivate employees and drive team performance.
• Strong people management and leadership skills, including setting expectations, coaching, providing feedback, and managing employee performance.
• Experience with workforce planning and resource management, including staffing, workload balancing, prioritization, and resource allocation.
• Proven ability to develop employees, identify growth opportunities, and build team capabilities.
• Strong program and project management skills, including managing schedules, deliverables, risks, dependencies, resources, and performance objectives.
• Demonstrated ability to establish accountability and ownership across teams and drive commitments through completion.
• Excellent written, verbal, presentation, and interpersonal communication skills, with the ability to communicate effectively with employees, customers, and senior leadership.
• Strong stakeholder management skills, including the ability to build trusted relationships, manage expectations, and balance competing priorities.
• Demonstrated problem-solving and decision-making skills, with the ability to identify issues, evaluate options, and remove barriers to team success.
• Strong conflict-resolution skills and the ability to facilitate difficult conversations and resolve issues constructively.
• Ability to effectively lead teams through change, growth, and ambiguity while maintaining employee engagement and focus on organizational objectives.
• Ability to balance employee needs, customer expectations, and program priorities while maintaining a high level of team performance.

Desired Skills

• Experience with talent development and succession planning, including identifying and developing future team leaders.
• Experience recruiting, interviewing, selecting, onboarding, and integrating new employees.
• Experience developing and implementing team structures, operating models, processes, and performance improvements.
• Experience managing technical or multidisciplinary teams, including engineering, IT, cybersecurity, software, data, or related disciplines.
• Experience supporting government, federal, defense, or other regulated programs and customers.
• Familiarity with government contracting environments, contractual requirements, deliverables, and customer expectations.
• Experience managing or contributing to program budgets, forecasts, staffing plans, labor utilization, and financial performance.
• Experience supporting program growth, proposals, new work, and workforce planning for expanding programs.
• Familiarity with Agile, Scrum, traditional project management, or hybrid delivery methodologies.
• PMP, PgMP, Agile/Scrum, or relevant leadership or management certification.
• Demonstrated ability to build a collaborative, accountable, and high-performing team culture that supports employee engagement, retention, and professional growth.