Principal Program Manager

Business Area: Engineering Seniority Level: Mid-Senior level Job Description: At Cloudera, we empower people to transform complex data into clear and actionable insights. With as much data under management as the hyperscalers, we're the preferred data partner for the top companies in almost every industry. Powered by the relentless innovation of the open source community, Cloudera advances digital transformation for the world’s largest enterprises. The Program Management Office (PMO) at Cloudera is responsible for establishing tight interlocks between Product Management, Engineering, Quality, UX/Docs, Enterprise Strategy, Support and other relevant counterparts, in order to deliver high-quality products to our customers. The PMO designs and drives the adoption of product development best practices and also places emphasis on reducing nagging pain points and friction between teams. Product feature intake requests are consolidated and the PMO acts as a forcing function to standardize business cases and govern financial opportunity modeling. The success of the PMO depends on the ability to manage new feature requests through the Qualified Inputs process and Engineering product releases, across multiple product pillars. This position requires both a technical and program management background with direct experience developing and deploying software or cloud-based services to customers. The Principal Program Manager on this team will have a firm understanding of product development best practices, the SDLC, and engineering execution frameworks. Additionally, this position requires the ability to go wide across several projects in parallel, and also know when and how to go deep on technical requirements when needed, in order to anticipate bottlenecks, facilitate trade-offs, and balance business needs with technical constraints. The ability to understand the big picture of the project design, customer landscape, and anticipate and account for dependencies is crucial. The Principal Program Manager must also be able to take large, complex programs, break them into manageable pieces, and hold teams and task owners accountable while fostering a collaborative environment to deliver results for our customers. As a Principal Program Manager you will: Lead and coordinate triage activities for product pillar initiatives in partnership with cross-functional Product, Engineering, and UX teams. Collaborate closely with Product Managers to ensure that business case data is complete, accurate, and provided by the appropriate stakeholders and requestors. Deliver complex, multi-year, multi-team product or platform objectives with a high standard of judgment, innovation, and execution. Tackle open-ended problems that require strategic prioritization and clear definition of both the what and the how to achieve outcomes. Drive end-to-end delivery and execution of qualified product pillar initiatives by managing timelines, dependencies, risks, and deliverables across multiple teams. Continuously evaluates the critical path by analyzing product requirements and corresponding engineering workstreams, proactively identifying and eliminating inefficiencies to accelerate execution and maximize impact. Provide clear, consistent, and proactive communication of initiative status, risks, and progress to stakeholders and leadership. Escalate risks or blockers that may impact key milestones, and collaborate with execution teams to define and implement effective mitigation plans. Apply a proven set of program management skills and sophisticated delivery approaches tailored to the unique needs and complexity of each program. Own and execute Engineering product releases through full-cycle program management by aligning release timelines and milestones with the global release calendar, maintaining comprehensive dashboards that accurately reflect scope, progress, and quality health, ensuring adherence to JIRA standards and data hygiene for transparent reporting, managi ... (truncated, view full listing at source)