Senior Director of Program Delivery

Code for America believes government can work for the people, by the people, in the new digital age, and that government at all levels can and should work well for all people. For more than a decade, we’ve worked to show that with the mindful use of technology, we can break down barriers, meet community needs, and find real solutions.

Our employees build and transform government and community tools and services, making them so good they inspire change. We merge the best parts of technology, nonprofit, and government to help support the people who need it most.

With a focus on transparency and fairness, and deep empathy for partners in government and community organizations and the people that our partners serve, we’re building a movement of motivated change agents driven by meaningful results and lasting impact.

At Code for America, you contribute to exciting work while learning and developing in a supportive and flexible environment. Our compensation and benefits are holistic and thoughtfully curated to represent our employees and our mission. Help us drive real generational change that lasts.

Code for America is looking for a talented Senior Director of Program Delivery who will provide strategic leadership for delivery excellence, ensuring projects consistently meet their goals and strengthen the organization's reputation. Your guidance will empower your team to thrive as leaders and create stronger, more consistent delivery systems across the organization. By ensuring projects are executed with discipline and vision, you will directly position the organization to scale its impact in critical safety net areas like SNAP and Medicaid.

About The Role:

Code for America is a leading implementer of human-centered design and technology approaches, with a mission to help make government work well for everyone. Our projects include custom software development (e.g., building a new online child care application in Illinois), technology-enabled advisory services (e.g., standing up a new automated Medicaid renewals system in Minnesota), and scalable product development (e.g., building Summer EBT products for multiple states to use). 

At a time when the social safety net is under historic strain, Code for America is being called on to help millions of people access critical benefits like SNAP and Medicaid. The Senior Director of Program Delivery will ensure we rise to that challenge — ensuring our projects are delivered with discipline, clarity, and excellence.

This leader will manage the Safety Net programs team, guiding them to deliver high-impact projects that meet the needs of governments, funders, and — most importantly — the people we serve. The Senior Director will be accountable for ensuring projects are delivered on time, within budget, and with outcomes that strengthen the fabric of the safety net. 

Working in close partnership with the Executive Director of Safety Net Strategy, this leader will ensure day-to-day execution is consistently aligned with strategic priorities and responsive to emerging shifts in the safety net ecosystem. Together, these roles will provide the balance of vision and disciplined delivery needed to meet this historic moment.

This role requires deep expertise in Safety Net benefit areas (SNAP and/or Medicaid), a strong understanding of civic technology, human-centered principles and practices,  and government systems. Finally, the person in this role must have the leadership skills to align complex, cross-disciplinary teams around ambitious goals.

This role will report to the Chief Operating Officer and is expected to travel no more than 15% of the time.

Code for America is based in California and can employ those who reside full-time within the United States. This is a remote position.

In This Position You Will:

• Program Delivery Excellence:
• Partner & Funder Stewardship:
• People & Team Leadership:
• Portfolio Leadership:
• Staffing & Resource Alignment:
• Other duties as assigned
• Own accountability for the successful delivery of the full Safety Net portfolio, ensuring projects meet timelines, budgets, and impact goals.
• Collaborate with the Partnerships team to ensure project scopes are realistic, aligned with Code for America’s delivery standards and impact goals, and incorporate input from delivery staff.
• Define and drive best-in-class delivery standards across all projects, including:
• Embed delivery practices across the team by rolling out training, templates, how-to guides, and governance mechanisms (e.g., regular project check-ins, quality assurance reviews). Reinforce adoption through change management, coaching, and feedback loops so that standards are not only defined but consistently applied in practice.
• Ensure financial stewardship of the portfolio by partnering with Finance, Revenue, and Development teams to align budgets with funding streams, track spend, and proactively anticipate risks and take advantage of opportunities.
• Develop consistent practices, tools, and training that raise the standard of program delivery across the department
• Project management: Ensure  every project is managed against clear goals, roles, timelines, and accountability, so progress is visible and delivery is reliable; ensure project kick-off and close-out processes are consistent across the portfolio. 
• Risk mitigation & compliance management: Proactively identify delivery and partnership risks, ensure clear escalation and timely resolution, and integrate compliance onboarding (e.g., HIPAA, security, data privacy) so new staff can contribute without delays or exposure).
• Partner engagement, accountability, and narrative: Set consistent expectations for communication, transparency, and collaborative decision-making with government partners, while aligning internal narratives for funders and stakeholders.
• Budget and commercial awareness: Ensure relevant leaders and team members understand cost realities, overhead, and philanthropic subsidy to ground decisions in financial feasibility.
• Documentation & knowledge sharing: Ensure goals and decisions are captured and shared consistently to strengthen collaboration and inform future projects and that lessons learned, tools, and templates are captured and reused across projects.
• Continuous improvement & learning: Build structured retrospectives and cross-portfolio practices that embed lessons into future delivery.
• Partner with the Program, Revenue, and Development teams to shape and sustain funding and partnership opportunities.
• Join cultivation conversations as the accountable delivery voice, helping translate delivery capabilities across disciplines into funder and partner confidence.
• Build trust with select funders/government leaders as needed to unblock or reinforce delivery.
• Directly manage programs staff (Directors & Associate Program Directors), setting clear expectations and supporting their growth as program & delivery leaders.
• Support current Project Sponsors from other disciplines who are leading projects, ensuring they have the systems and guidance needed to succeed; design and implement a more consistent, standardized model for project leadership going forward.
• Serve as an escalation point and thought partner on complex delivery and partnership challenges.
• Build consistency in how work is delivered across projects, in close collaboration with other discipline leaders.
• Help team members navigate ambiguity, resolve cross-functional challenges, and strengthen decision-making skills.
• Establish practices so every project has a clear vision holder (e.g., product, policy, or research lead), with early and consistent involvement of relevant disciplines to maintain alignment on problem framing and outcomes.
• Drive continuous improvement across the portfolio, raising the standard of program delivery and embedding best practices across teams.
• Surface insights from government partners to inform organizational strategy and partnership development. 
• Collaborate with the Executive Director of Safety Net Strategy to ensure day-to-day execution is aligned with strategic goals and emerging shifts in the safety net ecosystem. 
• Partner with the Partnerships team to ensure smooth handoffs and shared accountability across the lifecycle of an engagement. This includes (but is not limited to):
• Refining scoping practices to streamline the process, reduce inefficiencies, and clarify roles, ensuring scopes are realistic and have strong and consistent delivery leadership in place to carry the work from cultivation to implementation. 
• Building (and overseeing) a clear, repeatable project kickoff process so delivery teams, funders, and government partners start aligned. Clarifying roles and responsibilities during handoffs, reporting, and renewals to avoid gaps or duplication.
• Partner with discipline leaders and the Director of Resource Management to move from discipline-by-discipline decisions to coordinated, cross-disciplinary staffing aligned with Safety Net priorities.
• Ensure projects are staffed with the right skills and seniority to succeed, escalating when tradeoffs or reprioritization are needed.
• Collaborate with the Partnerships team and the Director of Resource Management to develop a taxonomy of project types and staffing ratios (e.g., cohort/multi-state hub, light-touch advisory, deeper technical builds) to enable predictable scoping, staffing, and scaling.
• Collaborate with the Director of Resource Management to identify when new skills or roles will be required and collaborate with leadership to inform hiring and staff development plans.

About You:

• Program Delivery Leadership: 12+ years of experience leading complex, multi-disciplinary projects or programs, with accountability for on-time, on-budget, and outcomes-focused delivery.
• Domain Expertise: Deep expertise in SNAP and/or Medicaid policy and delivery, with a demonstrated ability to work effectively across government and technology.
• Civic tech/government background: Proven track record working at the intersection of government and technology, ideally within civic tech, human-centered design, or public sector service delivery.
• Strategic partnership: Skilled at aligning execution with organizational strategy, working closely with peers in strategy, product, design, engineering, and revenue/partnerships.
• Financial acumen: Ability to understand and manage project budgets, align with funding streams, and anticipate risks.
• Communication: Exceptional facilitation, written, and verbal communication skills; able to synthesize complexity and influence across senior leadership and external partners.
• People management: Experienced manager, with a track record of coaching and developing senior program leaders.
• Stakeholder management: Skilled at building trusted relationships with government leaders and funders, and cross-functional collaborators
• Multi-disciplinary collaboration: Experience working with multi-disciplinary teams where designers, policy experts, researchers, and technologists collaborate with government partners.
• Change management: Experience leading teams through change, building buy-in for new processes, and ensuring adoption.
• Operational discipline: A proven track record of designing and implementing systems that strengthen delivery practices across an organization.
• Tool fluency: Familiarity with delivery and resource management tools (e.g., Asana, Airtable, Jira) and comfort adopting or embedding new systems to improve delivery consistency.
• Organization & detail: Exceptional organizational skills and attention to detail with the ability to thrive in a fast-paced, dynamic environment.

It’S A Bonus If You Have:

• Prior experience leading large-scale safety net programs or portfolios in government or civic tech organizations.
• Experience overseeing a portfolio of projects and managing delivery at scale in a professional services, nonprofit, or consulting environment.
• Understanding of the broader safety net and civic tech ecosystem, with relationships that can strengthen Code for America’s positioning and partnerships.

What You’Ll Get

Salary:

Code for America’s salary bands are transparent as a part of our commitment to transparency and fairness. As part of our hiring practices, we aim to target the midpoint of the 2nd quartile of the range for all new hires.

Offer targets vary based on market / geographic location. The offer targets for this role range from $154,891 to $189,613, annually.

Benefits And Perks:

• Values:
• Leadership and teammates who share a strong work ethic and values, and who respect and care for one another
• A collaborative, cross-functional, hardworking, and joyful environment
• Employee Enablement Support: 
• Laptop provided
• $700 remote environment setup; $200 stipend and up to $500 reimbursement, in accordance with our equipment policy
• Cell phone and/or internet reimbursement of $50 per month 
• Professional Development:
• $1000 annual (per calendar year) stipend towards professional development; prorated at time of hire
• Up to $1000 of professional development funds can be rolled over each year, up to a maximum of $2000
• Retirement & 401k Plans:
• Employees under 3 years are eligible for a 100% employer match of up to 3% of employee contribution
• Employees with 3+ years are eligible for an additional 50% employer contribution over 3%, to a maximum of 5%
• Medical:
• Full benefits package with options up to 100% coverage toward select medical, dental, and vision plans
• Employer contributes up to 80% of the cost towards dependent and family coverage
• Remote Work:
• Code for America employees may work remotely across the US
• Code for America employees main residence must be within the US
• Full-time employees work 40 hours per week, Monday - Friday
• Collaborative working hours: we aim to hold all internal meetings between 10 AM - 3 PM PT. We expect all Code for America staff to be available during these set working hours
• Time Off: 
• Open personal time off, a minimum of 16 paid holidays, and an org-wide closure from Christmas Day through New Year's Day
• Paid sick time; up to 96 hours annually
• Competitive paid parental and family leave
• 4 weeks of paid sabbatical after 4 years of service, with an option of up to 4 additional weeks of unpaid time away

Equal Employment Opportunity:

Code for America is an equal opportunity employer. Applicants will not be discriminated against because of race, color, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, religion, national origin, citizenship status, disability, ancestry, marital status, veteran status, medical condition or any protected category prohibited by local, state or federal laws.

Code For America Workers United:

This position is not covered by a Collective Bargaining Agreement between Code for America and Code for America Workers United, affiliated with OPEIU, Local 1010. The agreement was ratified on October 27, 2023, and is currently in effect.

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