Program Manager - AI Agency

EVERSANA is a global marketing agency focused on the life sciences industry, and they are seeking a Program Manager for their AI Agency. The role involves leading complex client engagements, coordinating cross-functional teams, and ensuring timely delivery of projects that leverage AI-driven marketing strategies.

Responsibilities:

• Lead project planning for new client engagements - translating statements of work and strategic briefs into detailed project plans with clear milestones, deliverables, dependencies, and resource requirements
• Develop and maintain project timelines, workback schedules, and delivery roadmaps that account for client review cycles, regulatory requirements, platform dependencies, and cross-functional coordination needs
• Own the day-to-day execution of client projects - running daily standups, tracking progress against milestones, identifying blockers, and ensuring teams have what they need to deliver on time
• Establish and maintain project governance structures - including status reporting, risk logs, change request protocols, and client communication cadences - that provide transparency and accountability throughout the engagement lifecycle
• Serve as the central coordination point for cross-functional delivery teams - including Strategic Operators, Creative Operators, Activation Directors, Client Solutions, platform engineering, and external vendor partners
• Facilitate seamless handoffs between strategy, creative, activation, and platform delivery - ensuring work moves efficiently through the pipeline without rework, delays, or misalignment
• Resolve scheduling conflicts, resource constraints, and priority tensions across multiple concurrent projects - balancing client urgency with team capacity and strategic importance
• Partner with functional leads to ensure the right people are staffed to the right work at the right time - advocating for resource adjustments when project needs shift
• Serve as a client point of contact for project status, timeline updates, and delivery coordination - building trust through consistent communication, proactive transparency, and reliable follow-through
• Lead project meetings, including kickoffs, check-ins, milestone reviews, and retrospectives - ensuring meetings are productive, action-oriented, and move work forward
• Manage expectations around scope, timelines, and deliverables - clearly communicating what's included, what's not, and what trade-offs exist when priorities shift
• Surface and escalate project risks, scope changes, or timeline impacts to Account Directors early - providing clear options and recommendations for path forward
• Own project-level budget tracking and resource utilization - monitoring hours against budget, identifying variances, and flagging financial risks before they impact account profitability
• Manage scope boundaries vigilantly - identifying scope creep early, documenting out-of-scope requests, and working with Account Directors to convert scope changes into formal change orders
• Track project profitability at the workstream level - understanding where time is being spent, where efficiency can be gained, and where process improvements can improve margin without compromising quality
• Contribute to scoping and estimation for new work - providing input on level of effort, resource requirements, and delivery timelines based on actual project experience
• Identify patterns, inefficiencies, and friction points in delivery workflows - and build solutions that make the next project run more smoothly than the last
• Contribute to the development of standardized delivery frameworks, project templates, and process documentation that improve consistency and scalability across the AI Agency
• Lead post-project retrospectives with internal teams - capturing lessons learned, celebrating wins, and converting insights into actionable process improvements
• Partner with operations and enablement teams to evolve project management tools, reporting templates, and delivery best practices that support the AI Agency's growth
• Anticipate project risks before they materialize - including resource constraints, timeline conflicts, dependency gaps, client availability issues, and technical blockers
• Build contingency plans and mitigation strategies for high-risk projects - ensuring backup options exist when things don't go according to plan
• Navigate ambiguity and make decisions under pressure - knowing when to escalate, when to problem-solve independently, and when to bring teams together to find a path forward

Requirements:

• 7+ years of experience in project management, delivery leadership, or program management within pharma, life sciences, healthcare marketing, or agency environments, with a track record of delivering complex, multi-workstream client engagements on time and on budget
• Demonstrated experience managing cross-functional teams in a client delivery environment - including coordinating creative, strategy, technology, and operations teams to deliver unified outcomes
• Working knowledge of pharma commercialization and marketing operations - including brand strategy, omnichannel campaign development, content production workflows, regulatory review processes, and the compliance requirements that govern pharma marketing
• Experience managing project budgets, tracking resource utilization, and operating with P&L accountability - with an understanding of how delivery efficiency impacts account profitability
• Prior experience working in a fast-paced, early-stage, or high-growth environment where processes are still being built and adaptability is required
• Delivery operator: You know how to take a complex scope of work and break it into executable plans with clear owners, deadlines, and success criteria - and you know how to keep those plans on track without becoming a bottleneck
• Coordination expert: You can orchestrate multiple teams, timelines, and dependencies simultaneously - ensuring nothing falls through the cracks and everyone knows what's expected of them
• Clear communicator: You can run a client meeting with confidence, deliver a difficult message with clarity, and write a status update that tells people what they need to know without wasting their time
• Scope guardian: You know where advisory ends and execution begins, and you hold that line with clients and internal teams - even when it's uncomfortable
• Problem solver under pressure: You don't panic when things go sideways - you assess the situation, build options, make decisions, and keep the team moving forward
• Process builder: You see patterns in chaos and build lightweight systems that make work more predictable, scalable, and repeatable without adding bureaucracy
• You are actively using AI tools in your daily work right now - not just for writing emails, but to build workflows, test prompts, generate creative, analyze data, and solve problems you haven't been trained to solve yet
• You follow what's happening in the AI and martech space closely enough to have real opinions - about what works, what doesn't, what's overhyped, and what pharma brands should actually pay attention to
• You experiment before you wait for permission. When a new tool drops, you open it. When a client asks 'can AI do X?', you've already tried
• You can credibly demonstrate what AI-generated content, journey logic, or platform automation looks like to a skeptical CMO - not in theory, but with something you've actually built or run
• You are energized by ambiguity and early-stage environments - you know how to operate in a space that is still being defined, and you help define it
• You hold high standards for clarity and push back when a plan isn't ready to execute
• You default to intellectual honesty with clients, even when the honest answer is 'not yet.'
• You care about measurable outcomes, not just smooth engagements