Program Manager

About Nava

Nava is a consultancy and public benefit corporation working to make government services simple and effective. Since 2015, federal, state, and local agencies have trusted Nava to help solve highly scrutinized technology modernization challenges.

As a client services company, we guide agencies constrained by legacy systems to a future with sharp user experiences built on secure, reliable, fault‑tolerant cloud infrastructure. We bill for our time, offering our expertise and problem‑solving approach to help our government partners enhance their digital products and services. People are at the heart of our work, from members of the public who rely on benefit programs to government agency staff.

Through human‑centered design and modern engineering best practices, we help our government partners understand user needs and deliver on their missions more effectively. This focus gives everyone at Nava the opportunity to do work that is meaningful, impactful, and deeply connected to public good.

The Program Manager will be accountable for ensuring all contract commitments, milestones, and deliverables stay on track, while maintaining strong alignment with the program’s vision. They will serve as the primary escalation point for contract issues with the COR, deliver comprehensive monthly status updates to CMS, and ensure resources are deployed effectively to maximize delivery speed and impact.

The Program Manager will foster proactive communication across all stakeholders, address risks before they affect outcomes, and champion process improvements that increase agility and responsiveness—keeping the program focused on reducing burden for states and applicants. The Program Manager will collaborate with the Product Manager and the Design Lead to ensure we do the discovery necessary to properly scope and gather requirements for new pilot states.

• Exceed the expectations of our government partners by cultivating strong, trusting relationships and maintaining high situational awareness at the agency level
• Proactively detect risks and work collaboratively with the delivery team and program stakeholders to effectively resolve them (issues can span delivery, process, culture, expectation setting, staffing, contract milestones, finances)
• Engage our clients on a continuing basis to ensure their needs are met or exceeded, understand their vision, collaboratively solve issues, and communicate our progress transparently
• Maintain awareness of the broader project landscape and potential for new opportunities and risks and grow your portfolio accordingly with surge contract line item numbers (CLINs), option years, and negotiations with prime contractors
• Collaborate across projects and across the organization to proactively anticipate and solve problems across delivery
• Support the creation of delivery environments built on mutual trust between government partners and our team
• Scale efforts through a team of project managers and other functional delivery leads
• Manage all the contracts and finances on within your portfolio in coordination with the finance team and coordinate necessary contract modifications
• Set and uphold standards for delivery excellence and client service
• Apply Nava's policies and guidance at the program level (E.g. utilization guidance)
• Participate in developing on and delivering company objectives and key results

• Must have experience with Custom Software or Cloud infrastructure programs/projects
• Experience working with or for government agencies
• Experience with growing agile development teams and the challenges of managing a project at scale
• Ability to demonstrate experience leading projects with significant complexity, including managing milestones, dependencies, and integrations with significant risk, uncertainty or scale
• Experience using agile frameworks like scrum, kanban, or SAFe and familiarity with agile development practices such as continuous integration and continuous delivery
• You are an empathetic communicator and relationship builder – you take a service‑oriented approach to supporting the program team and our clients
• Adaptable problem solving and ability to deal with…