Senior Program Manager

Senior Program Manager - Federal Programs & Growth

The Senior Program Manager reports directly to the Vice President of Strategic Growth and is responsible for leading the execution and growth of @Orchard's federal programs. This role manages a portfolio of federal task orders while partnering with the Vice President to identify, capture, and win new work across the company's federal contract vehicles. The position serves as the operational leader for assigned programs, ensuring exceptional customer satisfaction, financial performance, compliance, and employee success.

This position is a corporate leadership role-not an embedded, single-contract assignment. The Senior Program Manager owns successful program delivery, customer relationships, identification of follow-on opportunities, capture and proposal support, and operational transition after award. The Vice President of Strategic Growth retains ownership of enterprise growth strategy and the company's pipeline, capture, bid/no-bid, teaming, and proposal strategy decisions.

Key Responsibilities:

• Manage a portfolio of multiple federal contracts and task orders simultaneously.
• Provide hands-on oversight of program performance, customer satisfaction, staffing, schedules, deliverables, quality, compliance, and financial results.
• Serve as the primary program-level point of contact for Government Contracting Officers, Contracting Officer's Representatives, program officials, scientists, technical leads, and other customer stakeholders.
• Lead recurring customer meetings, including monthly program reviews, status meetings, technical discussions, and performance briefings.
• Establish and maintain program management plans, schedules, risk registers, action-item logs, staffing plans, and performance metrics.
• Ensure all contract deliverables are accurate, complete, compliant, and submitted on schedule.
• Identify program risks, performance issues, and customer concerns early and implement corrective actions before they affect delivery.
• Support contract modifications, option-year exercises, funding actions, personnel changes, and contract closeout activities.
• Maintain documentation necessary to support strong customer evaluations and CPARS ratings.

• Prepare, review, and submit monthly program status reports in accordance with contract requirements.
• Collect and review weekly status reports from program staff and ensure that accomplishments, risks, challenges, and upcoming activities are accurately documented.
• Develop executive-level program summaries and performance briefings for company leadership.
• Track contractual milestones, deliverables, staffing commitments, key performance indicators, and customer action items.
• Ensure program documentation is complete, current, organized, and audit-ready.
• Maintain clear communication between program staff, company leadership, Finance, Contracts, Human Resources, Recruiting, and government customers.

• Lead, supervise, and support employees and subcontractors assigned to multiple federal task orders.
• Establish clear roles, responsibilities, performance expectations, and reporting requirements for program personnel.
• Conduct regular staff meetings, one-on-one discussions, performance reviews, and employee-development conversations.
• Monitor employee performance, engagement, workload, utilization, and retention.
• Address performance, conduct, attendance, and customer-service issues promptly and in coordination with Human Resources.
• Forecast staffing requirements and work with Recruiting and Resource Management to fill vacancies and maintain uninterrupted program delivery.
• Support candidate evaluation, interviewing, selection, onboarding, orientation, and transition activities.
• Develop succession and backfill plans for critical program positions.
• Ensure employees understand and comply with contract requirements, company policies, timekeeping procedures, security requirements, and customer expectations.

• Manage the financial performance of assigned contracts and task orders.
• Monitor funding, labor utilization, burn rates, ceilings, revenue, direct costs, subcontractor costs, and program profitability.
• Review employee timekeeping and labor charging for accuracy and contractual compliance.
• Review and approve monthly invoices and supporting documentation before submission to the customer.
• Coordinate with Finance and Contracts to resolve billing discrepancies, funding concerns, contract questions, and payment issues.
• Ensure labor categories, staffing assignments, rates, and invoiced costs align with contractual requirements.
• Develop program forecasts and identify potential funding, staffing, schedule, or profitability issues.
• Support preparation of estimates, change requests, requests for equitable adjustment, and other contract-management actions when necessary.

• Develop and maintain trusted relationships with government customers and mission stakeholders.
• Maintain regular contact with Contracting Officers, CORs, program managers, scientists, and technical leaders.
• Understand each customer's mission, operating environment, priorities, challenges, and emerging requirements.
• Proactively resolve customer concerns and communicate program risks before they become performance issues.
• Identify opportunities to improve service delivery, expand support, and increase the value @Orchard provides to the customer.
• Represent @Orchard professionally during customer meetings, industry events, site visits, conferences, and other engagements.

• Identify and qualify task-order opportunities under @Orchard's existing IDIQ, BPA, GWAC, and GSA contract vehicles.
• Develop customer and opportunity intelligence through ongoing engagement with agency stakeholders, industry partners, and internal subject-matter experts.
• Work with the Vice President of Strategic Growth to develop capture strategies, win themes, solution concepts, staffing approaches, and teaming plans.
• Participate in bid/no-bid and gate-review decisions.
• Lead or support task-order capture efforts from opportunity identification through proposal submission and award.
• Coordinate proposal writers, subject-matter experts, recruiters, pricing personnel, subcontractors, and teaming partners.
• Contribute directly to technical, management, staffing, transition, quality-control, and past-performance proposal sections.
• Review proposal content for accuracy, compliance, responsiveness, and alignment with the customer's evaluation criteria.
• Support oral presentations, customer capability briefings, industry days, one-on-one meetings, and other pre-award activities.
• Maintain responsibility for both excellent execution of current work and continued growth of @Orchard's federal portfolio.

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in Business Administration, Public Administration, Project Management, Engineering, Science, Technology, or a related field.
• Project Management Professional certification required.
• At least 10 years of progressively responsible experience managing federal government contracts, task orders, or professional-services programs.
• Demonstrated experience managing multiple federal task orders or programs concurrently.
• Experience serving as a primary interface with Government Contracting Officers, CORs, program managers, scientists, technical leaders, and other federal stakeholders.
• Demonstrated experience managing program staff, subcontractors, deliverables, schedules, risks, quality, and customer relationships.
• Experience preparing monthly reports, reviewing employee status reports, conducting customer meetings, and managing contractual deliverables.
• Experience managing contract financials, including funding, labor utilization, burn rates, ceilings, forecasting, invoicing, and profitability.
• Demonstrated experience supporting or leading federal capture and proposal efforts.
• Working knowledge of the Federal Acquisition Regulation, federal contracting practices, contract administration, and task-order management.
• Strong leadership, organization, financial-management, problem-solving, and decision-making skills.
• Exceptional written, verbal, presentation, and customer-relationship skills.
• Ability to manage competing priorities in a fast-paced small-business environment.
• Proficiency with Microsoft 365, including Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Teams, and SharePoint.
• U.S. Citizenship required.

Preferred Qualification:

• Master's degree in Business Administration, Public Administration, Project Management, Engineering, Science, Technology, or a related field.
• Experience supporting one or more of @Orchard's core federal customers, including the Department of Defense, NOAA, NASA, EPA, or DOE.
• Experience managing scientific, technical, engineering, environmental, maritime, research, technology, or mission-support programs.
• Experience working under multiple-award IDIQs, BPAs, GWAC, GSA schedules, or similar federal contract vehicles.
• Demonstrated record of helping capture and win competitive federal task orders.
• Experience with CPARS, quality-management systems, ISO 9001 processes, and