ASCENDION Head of Program Management Office Program Operations & Governance | Fortune 50 Hi-Tech Client Program

Location Bengaluru, India

Reports to Program Executive / Client Partner

Team 8–12 project associates and analysts

Program scope Multi-year core platform program, 400–600 engineers across multiple delivery towers The Role This is the function that produces every number the client sees about the program: headcount, spend, delivery status, engineering performance, service levels, risk. It runs the operational machinery underneath a multi-year engagement of several hundred engineers, and it owns the evidence base on which the commercial relationship is governed.

That second part is what makes this role different from most PMO jobs. Under the governing contract, service levels carry financial consequence, and where the client's reported data conflicts with ours, the client's data governs. Reconciliation is therefore not hygiene it is commercial defense. When the program is measured, this function's numbers are the ones that must hold up.

You will lead a team of project associates and analysts, and your first job is to move that team from producing reports to producing answers.

What You'll Own Program Operations

- Onboarding and mobilization. Intake through productive at scale access provisioning, asset and device allocation, and the controls that make onboarding predictable rather than heroic. Time-to-productivity is measured, and it starts here.
- Workforce and resource management. Headcount tracking, allocations, roll-on and roll-off, and a clean, always-current split between billable resources and non-billable investment resources. The client tracks our people in their systems; our roster and theirs must agree.
- Time, billing and invoicing. Timesheet compliance, invoice accuracy and cycle time, revenue leakage, and resolution of billing queries before they become disputes. Accuracy here is a trust position, not an accounting one.
- Compliance and audit readiness. Device registration, imaging and wiping records, periodic compliance reporting, and the ability to answer an audit request completely and quickly. Assume you will be audited and build for it.

Governance and Assurance

- Stakeholder reporting.



The weekly and monthly reporting cadence for client and internal executives accurate, on time, and written so a senior reader gets the point in the first paragraph.
- Project-level RAG. A RAG status at individual project level with a defensible, evidence-based definition. Status should be a measurement, not an opinion, and it should be capable of surviving challenge from a delivery lead who disagrees with it.
- Engineering metrics. Velocity, commitment reliability, defect and escape rates, cycle time, release predictability, and time-to-productivity including cohort-level reporting for engineers in their first sixty days versus the established population.
- Agentic delivery progress. Adoption, usage and measured impact of AAVA and agentic engineering workflows across the program and a credible, defensible method for attributing productivity and quality gains to them.
- Contract commitments, SLAs and OLAs. Tracking delivery against contracted service levels and internal operating-level agreements, quantifying exposure where levels are at risk, and critically contemporaneously documenting client-side dependencies and delays that qualify as exceptions. Evidence gathered after the fact is worth very little.
- Risk and issue management. A live register with named owners, real escalation paths and enforced closure. Risks that sit open and unowned for a quarter are a PMO failure, not a delivery one.
- The PMO team. Leading, developing and raising the bar for a team of project associates and analysts from transactional administration toward analysis, insight and challenge.

What You'll Bring

- 15+ years in program management or program operations, including 5+ leading a PMO for a large, multi-year engagement of 300 people or more.
- Hands-on ownership of program operations at scale onboarding, resource management, timesheets, billing and invoicing across hundreds of contract workers.



This role touches the transactional detail, and you should be comfortable there.
- Contractual fluency. You can read an SOW and a master agreement, and translate service levels, credits, obligations and reporting commitments into a tracking regime that runs.
- Genuine data capability. Fluent in Jira or Azure DevOps, Confluence, Excel and a BI tool such as Power BI or Tableau and able to build a metrics layer that reconciles across systems, not just export a report from one.
- Executive communication. You write clearly for a VP and CIO audience and can hold a governance meeting where the numbers are being challenged.
- Experience leading a team of analysts or project associates, including performance management and capability building.
- Composure under scrutiny. Demanding client governance, weekly visibility and real consequences for misses are the operating conditions of this program, not an exception in it.

What Sets The Strongest Candidates Apart

- You have defended a service level or credit position using your own data and prevailed because the evidence was in order.
- You have built a program reporting and metrics layer from scratch rather than inheriting and maintaining one.
- You have operated where the client's system was the system of record and reconciliation was a standing discipline.
- You have measured the impact of AI-assisted or agentic engineering in a way that survived challenge from people who were skeptical of it.
- You bring a finance, audit or commercial background alongside PMO as this role sits close to revenue and cost.

Why This Role In most programs the PMO is a reporting function, and its output is read once and filed. Here it is the evidence base for a major client relationship: the numbers this team produces determine what the client believes about our performance, what we can defend contractually, and what we get paid. You will have the scale, the executive visibility, and because the program is still taking shape the room to build the operating model rather than administer someone else's.

Ascendion is an AI-native engineering company. We build the software that powers our clients' products and businesses. We are an equal prospect employer.

📌 PMO Lead (Bengaluru)
🏢 Ascendion
📍 Bengaluru