Job Opportunity: Sr Technical Program Manager-Merchandising & Planning
Location: 100% remote working est hours but prefers someone local to Philadelphia who would come onsite for meetings time to time. Client will expense.
Duration: 12+ month contract
Key Responsibility
• Lead end-to-end planning and delivery of complex technology programs
• Create and manage program roadmaps, timelines, dependencies, governance, risks, and communication plans.
• Coordinate multiple IT teams, business stakeholders, and third-party vendors to ensure successful delivery.
• Drive program planning activities, including scope review, dependency identification, milestone planning, and resource coordination.
• Establish program governance, reporting cadences, and executive-level status communications.
• Hold vendors and stakeholders accountable for deliverables, timelines, and commitments.
• Identify risks, gaps, and implementation challenges early and develop mitigation strategies.
• Oversee execution across multiple workstreams while ensuring alignment with business objectives.
Required Skills:
• 7+ years in technical project manager and program management combined.
• 5+ years of Retail Merchandising and planning experience
• Ability to own and plan complex, enterprise-level programs from initiation through delivery.
• Experience creating program structures, governance, dependencies, timelines, and communication cadences.
• Ability to influence stakeholders, hold vendors accountable, and drive decision-making.
• Strong organizational skills and the ability to operate in ambiguous environments.
• Experience identifying risks and "gotchas" early in the planning process.
• Comfortable working across multiple teams, vendors, and workstreams.
• Experience working with cross-functional teams (product, Dev, engineering, store operations, etc)
• End-to-end program planning
• Program governance
• Technical program artifacts
• Management of complex, multi-vendor technology initiatives
• Ownership of planning activities before work enters Jira
• Create structure where none exists.
• Navigate uncertainty.
• Drive alignment across teams.
• Dig into details and solve undefined problems.
• Retail industry experience
• Can drive technical discussions and align stakeholders across engineering teams
• Hold vendors accountable and proactively track progress
• Should understand multi-system environments and integrations
• Ability to see how changes in one system impact others across the broader ecosystem
• Experience working on large-scale, complex programs
• Highly organized and detail‑oriented – keeps plans, logs, and decision records current; follows through relentlessly.
BONUS
• Experience in retail or consumer environments is a plus, especially where store operations and supply chain are tightly coupled with corporate systems.
• Prior work in new market / new entity / international expansion contexts is strongly preferred, but not required if the candidate has led similar cross‑functional, multi‑system efforts.
• ERP experience