Staff Technology Portfolio Manager

We are looking for a Staff Technology Portfolio Manager to build and run the single place IT trusts for portfolio status, ownership, and risk. IT runs roughly 100 concurrent programs across six teams — ERP, supply chain technology, commercial systems, CX technology, workplace technology, and enterprise architecture & AI — and today nobody can say what's happening this week, who owns what, or what needs a decision before it becomes a fire. You're the first person we've hired specifically to fix that: this is hands-on, no direct reports — you build the system yourself, then run it day to day, AI-first from day one.

• →Build the single system of record for IT's portfolio — real, shared definitions of program "health" that every team trusts, replacing six different versions of the truth.
• →Understand every one of IT's ~100 programs: owner, status, target date, blocker, and why it matters — sourced from teams' existing working artifacts, not a parallel reporting burden.
• →Run the weekly portfolio review as a decision-forcing forum — write the pre-read, push open items to closure, and follow up until risks are actually resolved.
• →Map cross-team dependencies so quiet coupling between teams surfaces as a managed risk instead of a surprise.
• →Own intake governance so saying yes to new work is a deliberate trade-off — new requests get a real answer within a week.
• →Partner with IT Planning & Delivery leads and program managers to build a program office people want to be part of, not one they have to feed.
• →Use AI as your default operating method — build your own reporting, dependency-analysis, and risk-detection workflows with AI as a thought partner, not a checklist you bolt on afterward.

This is a remote US role with a preference for candidates based in San Francisco.

• 10+ years running programs or portfolios in a technology org — real complexity, competing stakeholders, and ambiguity worked through directly, not just tickets tracked.
• Demonstrated complex program management — you've built a portfolio system of record from scratch, or rebuilt one after it broke, in an org running many concurrent, interdependent workstreams.
• A habit of using LLM assistants and agents (e.g., Claude) as your default way of working — solving problems, building reports, analyzing dependencies, and surfacing emerging risk — with sound judgment about when AI isn't the right tool and discipline about verifying output before it ships.
• Strong PMO tooling fluency, with a track record of using AI to do reporting and analysis work that used to be done by hand.
• Enough enterprise IT fluency (ERP, identity, integrations, ITSM, compliance) to read a status update and ask the question that finds the real risk.
• Clear, compressed executive writing — you can turn ~100 programs into one page a leader can act on without losing what matters.
• Comfortable with ambiguity, and willing to say "this is at risk" before anyone asks.

• Jira, Confluence, and AI app-building platforms (e.g., Lovable) to prototype lightweight tools rather than waiting on engineering.
• Experience at a company that scaled through a step change, where process had to be built while delivery never stopped.