Program Manager

Who you are

• 5+ years of program or project management on complex software delivery. Government or regulated-industry clients strongly preferred
• You have managed contractual milestones, UAT-based acceptance, and formal change control, and you have the scars to show for it
• You write well. Status reports, meeting summaries, and acceptance criteria language will carry your name
• You can run a plan that depends on teams you do not manage, on both sides of the table
• Strongly preferred: experience with child care programs in state government (licensing, subsidy/CCAP, eligibility, or provider systems)
• A plus: state human services or eligibility systems experience, or familiarity with state procurement

What the job involves

• We need a Program Manager to run our state and enterprise engagements. You will own the delivery plan, the client relationship, and the coordination between our clients and our product and engineering teams, across every active project. This is a hands-on role. You will spend your time in project plans, client meetings, spreadsheets of acceptance criteria, and hard conversations about dates
• You are the person who makes sure what we promise to government and enterprise clients is what gets delivered, on time, on contract, with the paper trail to prove it
• Own the delivery plan for each engagement across all workstreams. Track milestones, UAT cycles, and acceptance against each contracted statement of work
• Run the client cadence on every project: weekly status, steering meetings, escalations, and working sessions with agency program staff, legal, and state IT
• Keep dependency registers current. Clients owe us integration specs, test environments, credentials, data feeds, and business decisions on a schedule. Hold both sides to their dates and keep the paper trail that supports excusable-delay and change-order claims
• Manage scope: capability traceability, acceptance criteria negotiation, change requests, and intake of new work
• Produce deliverables for client review and keep Wonderschool leadership ahead of risks across the whole portfolio instead of behind them
• Work with engineering leads on integration timelines with state systems (ERP platforms, state data hubs, SSO). You will not own technical design, but you need to follow the conversation and know when a date is slipping
• Build the repeatable program playbook as we add states and enterprise clients