Company Description
Open Innovation AI is a global technology company that specializes in developing advanced solutions for managing AI workloads. Its flagship product, the Open Innovation Cluster Manager (OICM), orchestrates complex AI tasks efficiently across diverse infrastructures. The platform is hardware-agnostic, optimized for various GPUs and accelerators hardware, and facilitates seamless integration and scalability for enterprise AI applications. Open Innovation AI focuses on optimizing and simplifying AI workload management and making AI technologies accessible to organizations of all sizes. With its innovative solutions, companies can reduce operational costs, accelerate time to value, and maximize their return on investment, ensuring that their AI strategies contribute directly to enhanced business outcomes.
Roles Overview:
The Program Director is accountable for the strategic leadership, governance, and successful delivery of large-scale, complex technology programs across multiple workstreams, customers, partners, and internal teams.
The role provides senior oversight across program planning, execution discipline, risk and issue management, financial governance, stakeholder alignment, customer communication, and transition into operations. The Program Director is responsible for ensuring that programs are delivered with clear ownership, structured governance, executive visibility, and measurable outcomes.
This position requires a senior leader with strong people management capability, solid technical understanding, customer orientation, and a results-driven mindset. The successful candidate must be able to guide delivery teams, engage effectively with technical and executive stakeholders, and drive complex programs to successful outcomes through disciplined execution, clear ownership, and strong governance.
The successful candidate must be comfortable operating in complex, fast-paced environments, managing senior stakeholders, leading multi-vendor delivery, and driving accountability across internal and external teams.
Role Responsibilities:
- Provide senior leadership and accountability for the successful delivery of large-scale, multi-workstream technology programs.
- Lead and manage Project Managers responsible for delivering assigned projects and workstreams.
- Establish clear delivery ownership, accountability, and performance expectations across the project management team.
- Ensure Project Managers maintain consistent execution discipline, planning quality, governance adherence, and delivery performance.
- Define, implement, and continuously improve program governance frameworks, delivery standards, reporting structures, and escalation mechanisms.
- Oversee the development and maintenance of integrated master program plans covering scope, schedule, dependencies, milestones, risks, and resource requirements.
- Ensure accurate project and program-level planning, RAID management, status reporting, meeting records, and delivery documentation.
- Chair or lead senior governance forums, steering committees, delivery reviews, and executive reporting cycles.
- Consolidate program-level risks, issues, dependencies, decisions, and mitigation actions across all workstreams.
- Act as the senior escalation point for delivery blockers, cross-functional dependencies, vendor issues, and customer-impacting risks.
- Work closely with engineering, architecture, operations, security, commercial, finance, and support teams to align delivery plans, dependencies, risks, and required decisions.
- Coordinate technical and non-technical stakeholders without replacing functional ownership or directly managing engineering resources.
- Engage with customers and senior stakeholders to ensure alignment on expectations, priorities, delivery progress, risks, and required decisions.
- Coordinate multi-vendor and partner delivery activities to ensure alignment on scope, timelines, dependencies, deliverables, and accountability.
- Ensure formal change control is applied across scope, schedule, cost, technical design, and delivery milestones.
- Own program-level financial governance, including budgets, forecasts, milestone tracking, commercial exposure, change requests, and cost impacts.
- Drive executive-level visibility through accurate reporting, performance tracking, and clear communication of progress, risks, issues, and decisions required.
- Ensure delivery quality, governance compliance, and consistency across all projects within the program.
- Support project management resource planning and allocation to ensure the right PM capacity and capability are available across assigned programs.
- Ensure operational readiness planning, handover documentation, support model alignment, and structured transition into steady-state operations.
- Promote delivery best practices, continuous improvement, governance maturity, and a culture of accountability across the project delivery function.
- Coach and support Project Managers to improve planning quality, stakeholder management, risk discipline, customer communication, and executive reporting.
Qualification, Experience, Competence and Certifications:
- Bachelor's degree in engineering, Information Technology, Computer Science, Business, or a related field.
- 15+ years of experience in technology, infrastructure, platform, systems integration, or large-scale delivery environments.
- Minimum 7–10 years of experience in program management or senior project delivery capability.
- Proven experience leading and managing Project Managers in complex delivery environments.
- Strong technical background or technical delivery experience, with the ability to understand infrastructure, platform, security, integration, and operational dependencies.
- Proven experience delivering large-scale, multi-workstream, multi-vendor technology programs.
- Strong understanding of project and program governance, including integrated planning, RAID management, milestone tracking, change control, and executive reporting.
- Demonstrated ability to establish and run senior governance forums, steering committees, delivery reviews, and executive reporting cycles.
- Strong customer orientation with the ability to manage expectations, build trust, and maintain delivery confidence in complex environments.
- Results-oriented mindset with the ability to drive execution, remove blockers, follow up on commitments, and ensure measurable delivery outcomes.
- Strong people management, leadership, coaching, and performance management skills.
- Strong stakeholder management skills with the ability to work effectively across engineering, architecture, operations, security, commercial, finance, vendors, and customers.
- Ability to operate effectively in fast-paced, high-pressure environments with multiple priorities and senior stakeholders.
- Strong decision-making capability with the ability to manage ambiguity, escalations, competing priorities, and cross-functional dependencies.
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills, including executive-level reporting and customer-facing communication.
- PMP, PgMP, MSP, or equivalent certification preferred.
- ITIL or operational service management knowledge is an advantage.
- Experience working on regulated or national-scale technology programs is advantageous
- Arabic language proficiency preferred
