Programme Manager - AI12-Month contract - €850 - €900 per day5 days a week on site in Dublin Payment/Fintech sector As a Programme Manager you will orchestrate a multi-year transformation across the payments processing platform with an AI-first engineering mindset.
You'll be accountable for driving delivery outcomes, aligning stakeholders, managing risk, and ensuring the programme delivers measurable business value on time and on budget.
What you'll do Own the overall modernisation programme plan: scope, timelines, milestones, dependencies, and critical path across multiple workstreams.
Lead governance rituals: steering committees, PI planning, status reporting, financial tracking, risk/issue/change management.
Partner with engineering, architecture, product, compliance, finance, and operations to align scope, manage trade-offs, and secure approvals.
Track and report budget, burn rate, resource allocations, and headcount plans; manage monthly budget reviews and forecast updates.
Establish programme dashboards and KPIs (delivery velocity, quality, adoption, benefits realisation) using data and AI-assisted tools for visibility.
Implement consistent delivery practices and ensure workstreams adhere to standards.
Coordinate enabling initiatives: AI rollout, new environment readiness, automation tooling, documentation and training plans.
Identify, analyse, and mitigate cross-stream risks and dependencies; drive resolution and escalation to leadership when needed.
Support organisational change management: stakeholder communications, executive updates, and adoption plans for new ways of working.
Mentor scrum masters within workstreams; cultivate a culture of continuous improvement, transparency, and accountability.
Experience you'll need10+ years managing large-scale, multi-stream technology programmes (preferably in payments/fintech or other regulated industries).
Proven success delivering modernisation/legacy transformation initiatives (cloud, microservices, event-driven architectures, AI/ ML, Dev Ops).
Strong grasp of agile-at-scale frameworks (SAFe, Le SS, Scrum) coupled with experience in traditional programme controls.
Demonstrated expertise in financial management (budgeting, forecasting, vendor & headcount tracking, ROI / benefit measurement).
Excellent stakeholder management and executive communication skills; able to align leaders, negotiate trade-offs, and present complex programme updates clearly.
Track record of implementing programme governance: risk/issue/change management, dependency tracking, quality controls, compliance oversight.
Familiarity with AI-first engineering tools (e.g., Codex/Copilot, automation dashboards) and data-driven decision-making.
Comfortable with tooling ecosystems: JIRA/Clarity/Planview, Power BI/Tableau dashboards, Confluence, Share Point, collaboration platforms.
Experience that would be great to have Payments domain knowledge Exposure to cloud migrations (AWS, GCP, Azure) and platform engineering/environment management.
Experience with organisational change management, training/adoption programmes, or AI-enabled operations.
Certifications: PMP, SAFe SPC, Pg MP, Prosci, ITIL, or equivalent.