Head of PMO

Your tasks

• Define the PMO's vision, mandate, operating model, and multi-year roadmap in partnership with other department Leadership
• Establish the PMO as a hub-and-spoke function: direct accountability for the enterprise Hub, with a dotted-line coordination model to the program managers embedded in the business.
• Define clear roles, decision rights, engagement models, and escalation paths across the hub-and-spoke model, so it is always clear what the PMO decides, what each Program Lead decides, and where the two need to align.

Governance & Standards

• Establish company-wide program management standards, playbooks, templates, and minimum controls, with common definitions for scope, milestones, financials, resources, risks, issues, dependencies, and value realization.
• Determine the right mix of agile, hybrid, and traditional delivery discipline for a given initiative based on its complexity, risk, and business need.
• Lead independent health reviews and recovery planning for strategically important initiatives when a program needs more support or intervention than it can generate on its own.

Team Leadership (the Hub)

• Hire, manage, and mentor the PMO's core team to support the programs execution objectives setting departmental budgets, performance targets, and career paths.
• Coordinate, without directing, the program managers matrixed into Fusion and Defense, ensuring they share a common practice and community even though they report through their programs day to day.
• Build enterprise program management capability company-wide through assessment, coaching, communities of practice, and talent development — for the PMO's own staff and for program managers embedded in Fusion and Defense.

Requirements

• Experience: 15+ years in program, portfolio, or PMO leadership, including demonstrated success building, transforming, or resetting a PMO or portfolio management function — establishing its mandate, operating model, governance routines, standards, and adoption roadmap, not just running one that already existed.
• Experience leading large, complex programs (billion-dollar scale preferred) within an engineering-intensive environment (semiconductor, laser, nuclear, space and defense, or similar).
• Experience operating across a matrixed organization and influencing program leaders, functional leaders, and executives without relying on direct authority.
• Experience working in ambiguous environment and demonstrated proficiency in building order and clarity from loosely defined problems.
• Experience leading or supporting a hub-and-spoke PMO model, with direct accountability for a central function and dotted-line relationships to embedded or divisional program managers.
• Strong business and financial acumen — able to connect strategy, execution, financial outcomes, capacity planning, investment choices, and measurable value.
• Exceptional executive presence and communication skills, including the ability to simplify complex portfolio information and facilitate tradeoff decisions with senior leadership.
• Comfortable introducing governance and standards in an engineering, science, or hardware-intensive environment without slowing technical teams down.
• Must be a U.S. citizen or national, U.S. permanent resident (current Green Card holder), or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum

• Demonstrated proficiency in one or more core engineering disciplines, such as Nuclear, Aerospace, Laser, Optics, Electrical or Mechanical
• Experience with design and construction of one of a kind prototype systems
• Experience in national laboratory, aerospace, defense, energy, or another engineering/science-intensive, regulated, or export-controlled environment.
• Ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. government security clearance, given this role's oversight of PMO staff and reporting that touch the Defense program; U.S. citizenship is required for clearance eligibility.