Principal Project Manager - Fully Remote!

Futures start here. Where first steps, new friendships, and confident learners are born. At KinderCare Learning Companies, the first and only early childhood education provider recognized with theGallup Exceptional Workplace Award, we offer a variety of early education and child care options for families. Whether it's KinderCare Learning Centers, Champions, or Crème de la Crème, we build confidence for kids, families, and the future we share. And we want you to join us in shaping it—in neighborhoods, at work, and in schools nationwide.

At KinderCare Learning Companies, you'll use your skills and expertise to support the work (and fun) that happens in our sites and centers every day. From marketers and strategists to financial analysts and data engineers, and so much more, we're all passionate about crafting a world where children, families, and organizations can thrive.

As Principal Project Manager you'll lead large-scale, cross-disciplinary projects in a dynamic environment, perfect for those skilled in navigating complex technical challenges while prioritizing customer experience and business objectives.

You'll lead the successful delivery of critical initiatives on our strategic roadmap, requiring significant personal accountability and autonomy. If you excel in planning, designing, implementing processes with product and engineering teams, driving decision-making and roadmap development to achieve measurable organizational impact, thrive in a fast-paced, innovative setting; if you enjoy collaborating with diverse teams, effectively handle bottlenecks and critical issues, and can balance business needs with technical constraints you are the ideal candidate!

Key qualities for success include strong leadership, negotiation skills, analytical abilities, and the capability to break down large projects into manageable tasks for timely delivery.

Job Responsibilities:

• Own the effective completion of large, high impact and highly cross-functional central initiatives while simultaneously and accurately tracking a set of smaller projects within product teams.
• Create program governance structures that empower teams to achieve successful outcomes.
• Manage executive and execution governance, program status reporting and Sr. Leader blocking issues & communications.
• Define multi-org product and operational standards, track and report program goals and achievements, dashboards, and processes.
• Drive strategic cross-functional planning, leading discovery, and prioritization by closely partnering with product managers, Scrum leads and engineering leads to develop program plans that include product and execution roadmaps, dependency tracking, and capacity plans.
• Facilitate Intake, prioritization, Monthly budget reviews, Annual and Quarterly planning, and weekly Scrum-of-Scrum between Product, Engineering, and partner teams throughout the organization.
• Drive continuous improvement across multi-org program teams enabling excellence in both offerings and processes dedicated to value delivery and benefits realization.
• Manage budgets and financial reporting for assigned programs, ensuring alignment with financial targets and tracking benchmarks related to program costs and return on investment.
• Influence program outcomes to align with KinderCare's IT, Product Management & Corporate strategy.
• Establish value framework and instrumentation to track & report value delivery, OKR and program metrics, communicate across all levels of leadership across the enterprise to ensure deliverables meet strategic objectives of program and enterprise.
• Establish strong relationships with key stakeholders across Sr. Leadership team, Field Operations, Product Management, Engineering, UX, Marketing, Finance, HR, and Corporate Strategy & Development. Develop a close working relationship with all partners to ensure that the team is focused on the highest priority outcomes and is helping deliver the most value to our field and families.
• Develop common mechanisms for communicating program status and blocking issues, for keeping key partners informed on the progress, dependencies, risks, and issues.

• 10+ years of Program/Project management disciplines including scope, schedule, budget, quality, along with risk and critical path management experience.
• Demonstrated experience leading the development and delivery of consumer-facing applications, ensuring a strong focus on end user experience and satisfaction
• Experience leading projects across multiple engineering teams, building sustainable processes and coordinating field releases.
• Working experience in Agile and PDLC. Expert in program and project management methodologies (Waterfall, Agile, etc.)
• Experience defining key performance measures used to drive multi-million-dollar businesses and reporting to executive management.
• Ability to quickly adapt to faster pace, shifting priorities, demands, and timelines through analytical and problem-solving capabilities.
• Experience communicating and representing work to senior leadership and framing discussions to gain valuable feedback and experience working with technical management teams to develop systems, solutions, and products.
• Project Management certification(s) required (PMP, PgMP, PMI-ACP etc.)
• Lean Six Sigma experience a plus.
• Requires slide deck preparation and strong presentation skills.
• Experienced professional with solid tactical abilities and an emphasis on delivering results
• Ability to influence and make some project decisions without authority.
• Highly analytical, fact driven, and committed to following structured methods with high attention to detail.