Senior Operations Program Manager

What We Need

Symbotic is seeking a Senior Operations Program Manager to drive operational excellence and program execution within Industrial Controls. This is an individual contributor role that will define and implement the operational infrastructure, processes, and cadence required to scale continuous improvement and sustaining engineering efforts for established product lines.

If you've held a Project Engineer or Technical Program Manager title and have been driving cross-functional coordination, process design, and operational execution, this role is the natural next step in formalizing that strategic impact.

Reporting to the Senior Program Manager of Industrial Controls Program Management, this role will work in close partnership (dotted-line) with engineering leadership and embed with product engineering teams to establish operational rhythm, manage the feature backlog, coordinate urgent corrective response efforts, and build the handoff processes that transition proof-of-concept systems to sustained ownership.

This is a high-impact role for a strategic operator who thrives at the intersection of process design, cross-functional coordination, and execution excellence. You'll build the operational foundation that enables engineering teams to scale while serving as the critical bridge across Industrial Controls and senior leadership.

What you’ll do

Operational Excellence

• Define and implement operational rhythm, processes, and planning frameworks for sustaining engineering teams.

• Own end-to-end program and project management for feature development, continuous improvement projects, and system enhancements across legacy product lines.

• Manage backlog prioritization, roadmap planning, and cross-functional dependencies across Industrial Controls.

• Establish transparency mechanisms (dashboards, reporting, status updates) that provide visibility into team health, progress, and risks.

Urgent Response and Standards

• Establish triage and resourcing processes for urgent corrective response efforts addressing deployed system failures or product defects.

• Lead development and rollout of engineering document standards to support consistency, quality, and scalability across product lines.

• Track incident trends and drive continuous improvement initiatives based on data-driven insights.

Cross-Functional Partnership

• Design and implement formal handoff processes to transition proof-of-concept systems to sustained engineering ownership.

• Serve as the operational bridge across sustaining engineering and innovation teams within Industrial Controls.

• Communicate program status, risks, and wins to senior leadership with clarity and data-driven insights.

What you’ll need

Required

• Minimum of 10 years of experience in operations, program management, or project engineering within technology or industrial environments.

• Proven track record of designing and implementing operational processes, workflows, and frameworks from the ground up.

• Strong project and program management skills with the ability to manage multiple complex workstreams simultaneously.

• Exceptional stakeholder management and influence skills; ability to drive alignment across technical and non-technical teams.

• Data-driven approach to decision-making with strong analytical and problem-solving capabilities.

• Experience managing backlogs, feature prioritization, and roadmap planning.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills; ability to distill complexity into clear, actionable insights.

• Comfortable operating in ambiguous, fast-paced environments with shifting priorities.

• Individual contributor mindset with ability to influence and drive outcomes without direct authority.

Preferred

• Experience in industrial controls, robotics, automation, or related technical domains.

• Background in sustaining engineering operations or product lifecycle management.

• Experience managing urgent response or incident management processes.

• Familiarity with resource planning, capacity modeling, and team scaling.

• Demonstrated ability to establish engineering standards, documentation frameworks, or process improvements.

• Experience embedding with engineering teams as an operational partner.

Our environment

• Up to 40% of travel may be required. Employees must have a valid driver’s license and the ability to drive and/or fly to client and other customer locations.

• The employee is responsible for owning a credit card and managing expenses personally to be reimbursed on a bi-weekly basis.

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