Program Manager

About the Role
Help build, support, and operate technology used by more than 8,000 organizations in over 100 countries, moving AI from possibility to production in real-world enterprise environments every day. The Program Manager is responsible for leading the largest, most complex, and strategically important customer engagements while providing governance and delivery oversight across the regional project portfolio. This role serves as the senior point of accountability and escalation for project delivery within the region, ensuring that engagements are delivered to consistent standards, achieve the customer’s intended business outcomes, maintain strong confidence, and meet revenue, margin, and financial-performance objectives.
Candidates must be based in either Dubai or Riyadh.

Key Responsibilities

Strategic and Mega-Engagement Leadership

• Lead the largest and most complex customer programs from initiation through deployment, adoption, value realization, and transition to ongoing Customer Success.
• Establish the overall program vision, governance model, delivery strategy, integrated roadmap, and measurable success criteria.
• Coordinate multiple projects, workstreams, countries, partners, and stakeholder groups as one integrated program.
• Ensure that scope, solution design, delivery plans, and priorities align with the customer’s strategic and operational objectives.
• Maintain executive-level relationships with customer sponsors and provide clear, outcome-oriented program reporting.
• Drive timely decisions, remove cross-functional obstacles, and maintain momentum across the entire engagement.
• Ensure effective transitions from sales to delivery and from implementation to adoption and ongoing success.

Regional Delivery Governance

• Provide oversight of the regional project portfolio, focusing on strategic, high-value, high-risk or escalated engagements.
• Establish and enforce consistent delivery standards, governance practices, project controls, and quality expectations.
• Conduct regular portfolio and project-health reviews covering scope, schedule, financials, staffing, dependencies, risks, customer sentiment, and business outcomes.
• Ensure project teams maintain effective governance artifacts, including integrated plans, RAID logs, decision records, financial forecasts, status reports, and escalation plans.
• Identify systemic delivery risks, capability gaps, and recurring project issues, and lead regional improvement initiatives.
• Promote the consistent application and continuous improvement of delivery methodologies and best practices.
• Coach Project Managers, Delivery Managers, and project leads on program governance, executive communication, risk management, and customer engagement.

Escalation and Risk Management

• Act as the senior point of escalation for project-delivery issues across the region.
• Establish clear escalation paths, ownership, decision rights, and recovery actions.
• Intervene early when project conditions could affect customer objectives, delivery commitments, revenue, margin, or confidence.
• Lead recovery planning for critical projects, bringing together stakeholders from the company, partners, and customers.
• Escalate dependencies to relevant leadership teams and drive them through resolution.
• Ensure material risks and issues are communicated transparently, with clearly defined business impact, accountable owners, and target resolution dates.
• Balance immediate issue resolution with protection of the long-term customer relationship.

Customer Business-Value Realization

• Translate customer strategic priorities into measurable program objectives, operational KPIs, and value-realization plans.
• Ensure every strategic engagement has defined success measures covering business outcomes, customer experience, operational performance, adoption, and financial value.
• Maintain traceability between contracted deliverables, implementation outcomes, and the customer’s business case.
• Work with Customer Success and account teams to monitor adoption, benefits realization, and achievement of agreed outcomes following deployment.
• Facilitate periodic executive value reviews to demonstrate progress, validate realized benefits, and agree on actions.
• Ensure delivery decisions prioritize time-to-value and sustainable customer outcomes—not simply technical completion.
• Identify opportunities to expand adoption and deepen the customer’s strategic use of capabilities where this supports genuine value.

Revenue and Financial Accountability

• Own the consolidated financial performance of assigned strategic programs and provide governance over the regional project portfolio.
• Ensure accurate forecasting of revenue, backlog conversion, delivery velocity, resource demand, and project completion.
• Monitor revenue realization, project margin, effort consumption, and financial risks.
• Work with delivery and resource leaders to align staffing with project priorities and profitability objectives.
• Identify and resolve conditions that could delay revenue recognition or negatively affect margin.
• Ensure changes in scope are effectively governed and translated into appropriate controls.
• Partner with sales and account leadership to identify follow-on service opportunities while maintaining separation between delivery commitments and new scope.
• Contribute directly to achieving regional revenue and performance targets.

Cross-Functional Leadership

• Create alignment among Professional Services, Customer Success, Sales, Solution Engineering, Product, Support, Finance, partners, and customer teams.
• Establish an effective cadence for program leadership, workstream coordination, account-team alignment, and executive steering.
• Ensure decisions, actions, and dependencies are documented, communicated, and tracked to completion.
• Build a culture of ownership, transparency, constructive challenge, and continuous improvement.
• Represent regional delivery in strategic account planning, executive reviews, and pre-sales discussions for complex opportunities.
• Provide delivery insight during opportunity qualification and solution planning to ensure commitments are achievable.
• Capture and share lessons learned, reusable assets, and delivery best practices across the region.

Required Experience and Qualifications

• Typically 15 or more years of relevant experience with a bachelor’s degree, 12 or more years with a master’s degree, or 8 or more years with a PhD; equivalent combinations of education and substantial professional experience will also be considered.
• Recognized expertise in enterprise program management, professional services delivery, customer transformation, or a closely related field.
• Demonstrated success leading large, complex, and strategically important programs involving multiple projects, functions, partners, and geographies.
• Proven ability to serve as a principal adviser to senior leaders, helping shape critical decisions.
• Extensive experience establishing governance structures, delivery standards, operating plans, and controls for complex programs.
• Strong track record of solving ambiguous problems requiring considerable judgment.
• Demonstrated ability to assess risks and develop solutions accounting for dependencies and impacts across multiple functions.
• Proven accountability for program financial performance, including revenue forecasting and margin management.
• Experience connecting technology delivery to measurable customer outcomes, adoption goals, and value realization.
• Strong executive presence with experience establishing trusted relationships with internal leaders and external decision-makers.
• Ability to influence decisions and drive action across organizational boundaries.
• Experience providing guidance and coaching to project and program delivery professionals.
• Proven ability to lead large cross-functional initiatives.
• Deep understanding of enterprise cloud transformation and professional-services delivery.
• Exceptional executive communication, negotiation, facilitation, conflict-resolution, and escalation-management capabilities.
• Project or program management certification such as PgMP, PMP, PRINCE2, or equivalent is preferred.

Leadership Capabilities
The successful candidate will demonstrate:

• Executive presence and credibility.
• Strong ownership and accountability.
• Customer- and outcome-first decision-making.
• Commercial and financial acumen.
• Structured problem-solving and sound judgment.
• The ability to see both program-level detail and the broader strategic picture.
• Confidence operating in ambiguity and managing competing priorities.
• Empathy with a willingness to address difficult issues directly.
• The ability to influence without relying on formal authority.
• A continuous-improvement mindset and commitment to delivery excellence.

Benefits

• AI at enterprise scale – Build, support, and operate AI-powered technology used by over 8,000 organizations worldwide.
• A flexible-first culture – Join a global team with flexible working options designed to help people do their best work.
• Growth in the AI era – Build future-ready skills through mentorship, learning programs, and education support.
• Time to recharge and give back – Benefits include paid volunteer time, August Free Fridays, and well-being resources.
• Recognized globally – Certificated by Great Place to Work® in 17 countries; 94% of employees are proud to work here.