Rack Integration Project & Program Manager

Rack Integration Project & Program Manager JD

Project & Program Management — Ongoing Rack Integration Operations

Position Summary

The Site Project & Program Manager owns end-to-end program delivery for an operational pre-integrated rack production and deployment site. This role is the single program point of accountability on site: it owns rack production scheduling and arrival, materials coordination, warehouse balance, BOM accuracy, QA/QC and RMA processes, and the working interface with the integration partner and cross-functional teams. The role translates rack demand and need-by dates into an executable production and materials plan, maintains clear ownership boundaries between internal teams and the integration partner, and gives leadership a clear, numbers-based view of throughput, backlog, material readiness, and risk. The role is expected to preserve production continuity while strengthening the operating model, including trackers, forecasts, escalation paths, documented ownership, and automation of manual workflows.

Key Responsibilities

• •Operational Leadership & Operating Model
• •Assume ownership of the rack integration program with minimal disruption; maintain clear scope, ownership, cadence, meeting structure, reporting, and escalation paths.
• •Review, clarify, and maintain the internal-team vs. integration-partner responsibility matrix — including PO creation, material transfer, material delivery, rack build, on-site variations, QA/QC, and RMA — and keep written agreement current as scope evolves.
• •Identify and close ownership gaps where a responsibility is claimed on paper but not actually being executed on site.
• •Strengthen existing workflows using proven operating models from comparable sites, and feed improvements back to the broader program.

• •Rack Production Planning & Scheduling
• •Convert rack demand, need-by dates, and site requirements into a production schedule and rack arrival plan; sequence builds against material availability and warehouse capacity.
• •Own rack scheduling and arrival, in-rack cabling, network, and optics coordination with the site build teams.
• •Provide accurate BOMs and rack demand to the materials function; partner with product quality engineering on BOM development and build-BOM ownership.
• •Align production schedule with the integration partner's actual throughput capability, and escalate when the two diverge.
• •Re-plan quickly when program decommits, forecast changes, or scope pivots change need-by dates — and quantify the downstream impact each time rather than absorbing churn silently.

• •Materials, Inventory & Warehouse Process Integration
• •Maintain strong awareness of and integrate with process for incoming and outgoing material coordination, including truck coordination and daily inbound volume.
• •Align operational workflows with guidelines to support warehouse balance — neither overstocked nor understocked — and ensure safety hazards from pallets staged in aisles or between rows are prevented.
• •Feed rolling two-week demand forecasts and lock them for the integration partner's production planning.
• •Coordinate move orders, BOM-to-material matching, and mismatch resolutions through integrated materials systems.
• •Serve as the day-to-day liaison to the integration partner's materials team, aligning daily material signals with workflows.
• •Monitor and support resolution of aged, excess, or stranded inventory resulting from design or implementation changes.
• •Collaborate across on-site programs to align shared warehouse space and protect committed turnaround times.

• •Quality, RMA & On-Site Variations
• •Own QA/QC failure triage and the RMA process end to end, including clearing and preventing RMA backlogs.
• •Manage on-site variations to rack design and deployment methodology, with documented decisions and traceability.
• •Ensure rack deployment methodology is followed consistently and captured in site documentation.

• •Forecasting, Data & Performance Management
• •Build and maintain the site's production forecast, capacity model, capacity planning, master tracker, dashboards, and operational reporting.
• •Report on backlog, inventory, demand, material readiness, throughput, and schedule attainment; surface trends and future constraints early.
• •Reconcile data across demand, materials, and production systems to find discrepancies and improve data integrity.
• •Define KPIs for site health — schedule attainment, material readiness, RMA cycle time, warehouse utilization — and report against them in numbers, not adjectives.
• •Develop and maintain short-and long-range capacity-versus-demand models to evaluate deployment feasibility, identify constraints, support site intake decisions, and prevent commitments that exceed operational capacity.

• •Cross-Functional Leadership & Stakeholder Management
• •Act as the site coordination point across internal engineering and operations teams, the integration partner, product quality engineering, capacity planning, demand planning, logistics, and site build teams.
• •Lead production and materials reviews, capacity discussions, and issue resolution forums.
• •Communicate status, risk, capacity constraints, and decisions to leadership, including executive-level readouts on production plans and revised dates.
• •Broker alignment between teams with competing priorities and overlapping ownership claims, and resolve boundary disputes rather than escalating them repeatedly.
• •Coach and support on-site materials and coordination staff; distribute workload deliberately to prevent single-point dependency and burnout.

• •Risk, Issue & Change Management
• •Proactively identify material constraints, throughput bottlenecks, warehouse capacity limits, resource gaps, and system gaps.
• •Develop mitigation, recovery, and contingency plans that protect deployment commitments.
• •Assess and document downstream impact of demand decommits, forecast changes, design changes, and schedule shifts.
• •Drive escalations to closure with clear ownership, decisions, and impact recorded.
• •Plan for resource continuity — contract end dates, site ramp-down, and transition of scope to follow-on sites.

• •Automation, AI & Continuous Improvement
• •Replace manual spreadsheet-driven planning with integrated, automated tooling; manual recalculation of demand and materials is a known failure mode at existing sites and reducing it is an explicit expectation of this role.
• •Build AI-assisted tools, dashboards, and knowledge resources for forecasting, reporting, and decision support, and validate their outputs before operational use.
• •Capture lessons learned from established sites and convert them into reusable standards, playbooks, and process documentation.

Required Skills & Qualifications

• •Technical & Professional Skills
• •Strong knowledge of project and program management principles, production planning, and operational execution in a build/integration environment.
• •Demonstrated experience with materials management: demand forecasting, move orders, BOM matching, inbound/outbound logistics, inventory balance, and warehouse operations.
• •Experience owning QA/QC and RMA processes for hardware or integrated equipment.
• •Ability to build and maintain production schedules, capacity models, forecasts, trackers, dashboards, and KPI reporting from scratch.
• •Strong analytical and data reconciliation skills across multiple operational systems.
• •Experience defining ownership matrices and governance in a shared internal/vendor delivery model, and holding partners to committed scope.
• •Familiarity with generative AI, LLM platforms, and workflow automation, with the ability to apply them to planning, reporting, and knowledge management.
• •Proficiency with Google Workspace and standard program management and collaboration tooling.

• •Leadership & Interpersonal Skills
• •Proven ability to lead cross-functional delivery with technical, operational, and vendor stakeholders without direct reporting authority.
• •Composure