Senior Manager, Program Mgmt, Strategy & AI-Enabled Delivery

The Company

PayPal has been revolutionizing commerce globally for more than 25 years. Creating innovative experiences that make moving money, selling, and shopping simple, personalized, and secure, PayPal empowers consumers and businesses in approximately 200 markets to join and thrive in the global economy.

We operate a global, two-sided network at scale that connects hundreds of millions of merchants and consumers. We help merchants and consumers connect, transact, and complete payments, whether they are online or in person. PayPal is more than a connection to third-party payment networks. We provide proprietary payment solutions accepted by merchants that enable the completion of payments on our platform on behalf of our customers.

We offer our customers the flexibility to use their accounts to purchase and receive payments for goods and services, as well as the ability to transfer and withdraw funds. We enable consumers to exchange funds more safely with merchants using a variety of funding sources, which may include a bank account, a PayPal or Venmo account balance, PayPal and Venmo branded credit products, a credit card, a debit card, certain cryptocurrencies, or other stored value products such as gift cards, and eligible credit card rewards. Our PayPal, Venmo, and Xoom products also make it safer and simpler for friends and family to transfer funds to each other. We offer merchants an end-to-end payments solution that provides authorization and settlement capabilities, as well as instant access to funds and payouts. We also help merchants connect with their customers, process exchanges and returns, and manage risk. We enable consumers to engage in cross-border shopping and merchants to extend their global reach while reducing the complexity and friction involved in enabling cross-border trade.

Our beliefs are the foundation for how we conduct business every day. We live each day guided by our core values of Inclusion, Innovation, Collaboration, and Wellness. Together, our values ensure that we work together as one global team with our customers at the center of everything we do – and they push us to ensure we take care of ourselves, each other, and our communities.

Job Summary:

This leader owns the invest side of Enterprise Systems & Employee Technology. That means how we plan, fund, deliver and prove the value of technology investments: the three-year and one-year plans, portfolio governance, program management, and the methodology and governance the delivery model runs on. The role also leads ESET’s move from a standard delivery model to fully AI-enabled delivery.

Job Description:

Essential Responsibilities:

• Provide strategic oversight and management of program operations, ensuring alignment with organizational goals and driving innovation within the DCCE (Data Center & Cloud Evolution) space.
• Oversee the traceability of data center assets, including power and space considerations, to ensure accurate planning and optimization driven by program outcomes.
• Partner with business unit teams to strategically plan and implement initiatives that address technical debt, optimize underutilized resources, and improve data center workload efficiency.
• Monitor and report on cloud-driven workload transformations, aligning efforts to optimize data center operations and reduce redundant resource utilization.
• Evaluate and refine processes within operations, leading initiatives to build and implement the next level of operational improvements.
• Manage and control production applications and services across all PayPal CN data centers, ensuring high availability and operational excellence.
• Ensure site reliability by leading efforts to resolve cross-border operational issues in collaboration with global, cross-functional teams.
• Create and implement robust processes to enhance production stability, leveraging software development to support production operations effectively.
• Lead system monitoring initiatives by establishing standard monitoring policies, supporting event processing, and driving timely issue resolution to maintain operational integrity.

Minimum Qualifications:

• 8+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor’s degree OR Any equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Experience leading others

Additional Responsibilities & Preferred Qualifications :

Responsibilities include:

• AI-enabled delivery transformation — Own the roadmap and operating model for moving ESET from standard delivery to fully AI-enabled delivery across the whole lifecycle: requirements and design, build and data, testing, go-live and cutover, and hypercare through handover to Run. Set targets by value stream and platform. Lead the change, including team shapes, roles and skills for human-plus-AI work.
• AI-enabled delivery process — Define, stage by stage, where AI is applied, where humans decide, and how work hands off, with quality gates, traceability and audit evidence at each stage. Cover requirements capture and solution scoping, design, data readiness and migration, test design and automation, release and go-live readiness, and hypercare triage and knowledge transfer to Run.
• Methodology and governance — Own the delivery methodology and playbook (SDLC, agile and hybrid) that all value streams follow, replacing local approaches: stage gates, definitions of done, production-readiness and release criteria. Own the governance framework around it at portfolio, program and delivery level: forums, decision rights, RACI, escalation paths and decision logs. Publish, train, assess adherence, and revise both as AI-enabled delivery changes the model.
• Tooling, enablement and adoption — Identify, standardize and enable the AI tools for each delivery stage, working with platform owners. Run training and enablement. Track adoption and outcomes by value stream, platform and stage, so every analyst, engineer, tester and consultant is augmented and the tools are used well, not just licensed. Build-level engineering tools sit with the Run-side lead; this role makes sure they fit the end-to-end process.
• Delivery economics and sourcing — Reset estimation, level-of-effort conventions, capacity plans and budget requests for AI-enabled delivery. Write productivity commitments into vendor and integrator contracts and track the savings. Plan the mix of employees, contractors, vendors and agents.
• Strategy and planning framework — Own the three-year and one-year planning cycles: gate criteria, business-case and solution-scoping templates, and entry and exit criteria. Turn ESET strategy and operating-model direction into plans each stream can execute against.
• Portfolio and investment governance — Set how investments are categorized (Run, Grow, Transform), prioritized, funded and reviewed, with CapEx and OpEx treatment built into the standard. Run the portfolio review. Partner with the Run-side lead on the Run, Grow and Transform mix and on Run capacity.
• Work classification and intake — Own the standard that classifies work as projects, managed enhancements or Run tasks by size and planning cadence, with one intake and clear routing to tooling, funding and capacity.
• Program leadership — Own plan, status and executive readouts for the highest-priority cross-stream programs. Surface risks and dependencies early and escalate with a recommendation. Coach program leads across the organization.
• Total-cost resourcing — Standardize how budget requests are built: current capacity plus new headcount and contract workers at a blended rate, reviewed by Finance before submission. Keep the portfolio of record (ServiceNow SPM) reconciled across the three-year, one-year and in-year views.
• Benefits realization — Define how committed savings, such as insourcing, vendor consolidation and AI productivity gains, are baselined, tracked to actuals and supported under audit.

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