Senior Tribe Program Manager / Delivery Lead
Sabenza IT & Recruitment City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality, Gauteng, South Africa · ZAR 1M/yr
IT Services and IT Consulting · 11-50 employees
About the role
The Senior Tribe Program Manager will orchestrate delivery across multiple autonomous squads, managing dependencies and systemic impediments to ensure measurable outcomes. They are responsible for governing AI/Data roadmaps, facilitating tribe-level synchronization, and reporting on delivery metrics to executive stakeholders.
What they look for
Requirements
Candidates must possess 12-15+ years of technology delivery experience with at least 5 years in senior program or tribe-level leadership. A bachelor's degree in Engineering or Computer Science is required, along with deep expertise in telecommunications, scaled agile frameworks, and multi-site team management.
Full description
Our client is seeking a Senior Tribe Program Manager / Delivery Lead to join the Engineering Centre of Excellence (CoE) of a leading telecommunications group.
This senior program delivery leadership role acts as the critical orchestration layer between the CoE and the business/product tribes it serves. You will coordinate enterprise-scale delivery across 4–8 autonomous squads operating out of the Nigeria and Ghana engineering hubs, driving the AI, Data, BSS, HOME, Minimum Customer Experience and Sales & Distribution work-streams from initiation through to value release.
The focus is on optimizing the overall system of delivery — managing dependencies, removing systemic impediments, governing risk and ensuring measurable outcomes — rather than day-to-day squad task management.
Key Responsibilities
- Facilitate Tribe Sync and Scrum-of-Scrums cadences across 4–8 squads; map, manage and clear inter-squad and external dependencies before they impact the critical path.
- Own quarterly tribe OKRs and report attainment using instrumented delivery data (throughput, cycle time, flow efficiency, release frequency); run quarterly tribe maturity assessments and drive remediation plans.
- Sequence and govern AI/Data platform roadmaps (MLOps, AIOps, GenAI, Agentic AI), aligning model release cadence with data governance gates (lineage, consent, residency, model-risk) and tracking time-to-production.
- Drive delivery of fixed and converged broadband (HOME) product increments, synchronizing digital order journeys, provisioning, field installation and self-care releases with network rollout milestones.
- Enforce Minimum Customer Experience (Min CX) acceptance criteria as a definition-of-done gate across journey completion, latency, failure handling and accessibility; report conformance by squad and market.
- Deliver sales enablement and distribution digitization increments against commercial activation dates, coordinating agent/dealer tooling, channel applications, commissioning, stock visibility, training and support readiness.
- Maintain a consolidated capacity and skills view across Nigeria and Ghana hubs; re-balance squad composition to protect committed scope and promote cross-hub working practices (overlapping hours, shared environments, single backlog of record).
- Hold systems integrators, vendors and hyperscalers accountable for milestones, SOW compliance, defect turnaround and knowledge transfer; coordinate landing-zone readiness and joint architecture reviews.
- Produce executive summaries, dashboards and steering-committee packs; own the tribe RAID log; track budget consumption, capacity commitments and forecast variance; maintain program artifacts (charters, plans, decision records).
•
Requirements
- 12–15+ years of technology delivery experience, including at least 5 years in senior program or tribe-level delivery leadership.
- Proven leadership of scaled agile delivery using SAFe, Spotify tribe/squad model or equivalent enterprise operating model across multiple concurrent squads.
- Strong telecommunications domain depth across BSS and OSS (billing, charging, CRM, order management); experience with customer experience standards, sales & distribution channels and enterprise digital delivery.
- Track record of scaling engineering hubs in emerging markets (recruitment ramp-up, vendor-to-internal capability transition, multi-country synchronization).
- Experience delivering fixed or converged broadband propositions and exposure to AI/Data platform delivery at production scale.
- Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Computer Science or related discipline; postgraduate qualification and certifications such as SAFe, PMP or PgMP are advantageous.
- Advanced proficiency with delivery tooling (Jira or Azure DevOps – flow metrics, dependency boards); working fluency in at least one major cloud platform (Azure, AWS or GCP).
- Demonstrated ability to lead multi-site, multi-time-zone teams in emerging-market conditions; strong executive stakeholder management, vendor escalation and commercial/financial control (budget ownership, capacity planning, cost-to-serve reporting).
