Role Title: Contractor Senior Program Manager
Role Summary: The Contracted Senior Program Manager leads the planning and delivery of integrated, multi-workstream communication and event marketing programs spanning multiple disciplines, stakeholders, and deliverables from inception through completion for a specific client. This role provides structure, leadership, and oversight needed to deliver work on time, within scope and budget, and at a consistently high level of quality. This role brings the experience and judgment needed to lead with a proactive approach to navigating ambiguity, anticipating challenges, and keeping teams and clients aligned.
- Lead cross-functional teams and client stakeholders, managing expectations and providing strategic guidance throughout the engagement lifecycle.
- Define scopes, objectives, and success metrics; secure alignment on budgets, timelines, and deliverables both internally and externally.
- Anticipate risks and proactively manage scope changes, aligning internal teams and advising clients on recommended solutions.
- Delegate appropriate project responsibilities to cross-functional team members; establish clear ownership and follow through on outcomes.
- Provide oversight and structure so teams can work efficiently, collaborate effectively, and focus on producing exceptional work.
- Structure projects with evolving requirements, incomplete information, or shifting priorities, translating available information into a clear path forward.
- Consult with account agency leads on resourcing of vendors and partners as well as internal resources.
- Build and maintain detailed project plans, workback schedules, milestones, dependencies, budgets, responsibilities, and deliverables.
- Establish alignment at project kickoff on objectives, scope, timing, budget, roles, decision-making processes, workflows, communication expectations, and measures of success.
- Manage information and communications throughout the project lifecycle, documenting decisions and action items, maintaining accurate project records, and proactively adjusting plans as risks, resources, scope, or priorities change.
- Partner with the Account Director to align client expectations, priorities, budgets, talent resourcing, contractual commitments, and deadlines with the broader project team.
- Coordinate across Strategy, Creative, Production, specialty teams, and external partners to align resources, dependencies, handoffs, and realistic timelines for development, review, and approval.
- Facilitate cross-functional communication, translating client context and feedback into clear, actionable direction and ensuring teams understand how strategy, creative, production requirements, and client objectives connect.
- Translate client context and feedback into actionable direction, ensuring teams understand how strategy, creative, production requirements, and client objectives connect.
- Optimize cross-functional workflows and tools to clarify roles and responsibilities, ensure accountability, improve handoffs, and support team efficiency and scalability.
- Drive project execution against approved scope, timelines, milestones, budgets, and deliverables, prioritizing work as needed to maintain progress.
- Manage scope and change orders, identifying out-of-scope requests and partner with the Agency Account Director to communicate internally and externally all impacts to budget, timing, resources, and deliverables.
- Manage project financial health, monitoring budgets and up-to-date tracking of time utilization to provide regular accounting updates to the internal teams and clients and proactively escalating risks or variances to the appropriate stakeholders.
- Coordinate review and approval cycles, ensuring client feedback is consolidated, actionable, and delivered in time to protect the schedule.
- Ensure quality and delivery standards across all deliverables, maintaining brand integrity and technical accuracy.
- Facilitate project closeout and debriefs with internal teams, clients, and external partners to evaluate outcomes, metrics, and key learnings.
- Drive post-program reporting, synthesizing results, insights, and recommendations to inform future program strategy and client opportunities.
- Oversee financial reconciliation and project closeout, ensuring programs are delivered within approved budgets and final documentation and assets are properly archived.
What Success Looks Like
- Projects run smoothly and are delivered on time, within approved scope and budget, and at a consistently high level of quality.
- Exceptional, consistent communication is happening across all channels, clients, agency and vendors
- Teams, partners, and vendors have clear visibility into upcoming work, priorities, dependencies, deadlines and expectations.
- Strong partner and vendor relationships are built and maintained.
- Risks are identified early and addressed proactively before they materially impact delivery, budget, or client expectations.
- Cross-functional teams have the structure, communication, and support needed to produce strong work efficiently.
- Clients and Account leadership have confidence in program status, financial health, recommendations, and overall delivery.
Skills, Knowledge and Abilities
- Demonstrated experience managing complex, integrated programs across experiential, campaign, live event, strategy, creative, and digital work.
- Fluency in strategy and creative development workflows to be able to build workplans, resource appropriately and set clear expectations with clients.
- Strong project and financial management skills, including scope, budgets, forecasting, resource planning, and financial tracking.
- Exceptional organization and information synthesis, translating complex inputs into clear priorities, responsibilities, and actionable direction.
- Strong strategic thinking and problem-solving skills, with the ability to anticipate risks, navigate ambiguity, and recommend solutions.
- Strong cross-functional leadership and influence, with the ability to align teams and drive accountability without direct authority.
- Exceptional client and executive communication skills, with the ability to build trust, manage expectations, and guide decision-making.
Other Requirements: Must be available during Eastern Standard Time working hours. Contract runs through May 2027. There is no travel associated with this temporary position. Any dates mentioned are not guarantee of employment. The contractor should have 7 to 10 years of experience in marketing communications, campaign development, and production experience; experiential agency experience required.
Who We Are
We’re an experiential marketing agency that specializes in creating dynamic brand experiences that make an impact. We believe these experiences are important moments that can happen anywhere — onsite at an event, online, on a billboard, or across any other channel of a campaign. Audiences are overwhelmed with brands competing for their attention, so it takes true expertise to break through and turn those moments into experiences. That’s where we come in.
As an employee-owned agency, we’re fueled by curiosity, creativity, and a drive to help brands break through in meaningful, memorable ways. We believe in being great, doing good, and having fun while delivering bold, results-driven, award-winning work. With offices in the SF Bay Area, New York, and Chicago, our client partners include some of the most recognizable brands in the world. More than just vendors, we’re strategic allies and production-born experts who help brands own every moment — wherever they take place.