Senior Program Manager

About the RoleWe're hiring a Senior Program Manager, Employer Partnerships for our Pathways Forward Initiative. In this role, you'll be the operational backbone of an 18-month employer-facing initiative that changes how companies hire talent from low-income, justice-impacted communities and how workforce development organizations connect talent to jobs. This is a full-time consultant/vendor engagement with the possibility to transition to full-time hire. Compensation range: $90,000 – $120,000.This is not a strategy role. It's an execution role. You'll own the master workplan, drive coordination across six interconnected workstreams, manage external partner and vendor relationships, and build the systems and processes that keep a complex coalition moving at pace. You'll coordinate everything from vendor onboarding and contract administration to employer recruitment, faculty scheduling, multi-cycle program delivery, and large-scale convenings.You'll work closely with program leadership and a coalition of nonprofit, academic, and private-sector partners. The right person for this role thrives in ambiguity, builds structure where there is none, and communicates with the kind of judgment where nobody on the team is ever caught off guard.What You'll DoProgram Planning & Execution Build and maintain the master program workplan. Track progress against 18-month milestones across all workstreams. Run internal coordination meetings. Identify risks early and ensure the right people are positioned to resolve them. Develop the documentation, templates, workflows, and communications the team needs to operate autonomously.Vendor & Team Coordination Coordinate onboarding and alignment across vendors, student hires, and a marketing/communications lead. Own or ensure systems exist for issuing POs and contracts, processing vendor payments, administering sub-grants, and tracking deliverables. Ensure role clarity across workstreams and integrate every new hire into the master workplan.Partner Operations Manage relationships with multiple external partners. Set clear scope, goals, timelines, and budgets for each. Track deliverables, run regular check-ins, and manage cross-partner coordination during recruitment, program delivery, events, and reporting cycles.Employer Recruitment & Onboarding Drive employer engagement and recruitment in coordination with partners. Track the employer pipeline from outreach through confirmation. Manage onboarding and ensure participants are ready for cohort start dates. Target: approximately 10 employer participants per cycle.Program Delivery Coordination Coordinate delivery of a structured employer training and advising program across two full cycles. Schedule synchronous and asynchronous sessions, coordinate with faculty and delivery partners, and track completion of all advising engagements.Faculty Coordination Support recruitment of faculty participants. Coordinate participation agreements, manage scheduling, and ensure faculty are integrated into program delivery.Event Coordination Plan and execute four major convenings over the life of the initiative, ranging from 40 to 65 participants. Manage logistics, speaker coordination, participant communications, partner and vendor coordination, and post-event follow-up.What We're Looking ForYou have 5+ years of experience as a program manager managing complex, multi-workstream programs. You know how to build a workplan, hold people to it, and adjust when things shift. You're experienced in operational planning, program logistics, vendor and partner management, and KPI tracking. You communicate with precision and judgment. You're comfortable coordinating across internal teams, external partners, faculty, and employers simultaneously.This is a small team operating at startup speed with high autonomy. If you need someone to hand you a playbook, this isn't the right fit. If you build the playbook and then run it, we want to talk to you.