Vice President Program Operations

Smile Train is the world's leading cleft-focused organization. Our vision is a world where everyone has access to safe, high-quality comprehensive cleft care and can live a full and healthy life. We train and support doctors and other medical professionals to provide our patients with free, life-changing, comprehensive cleft treatment. This sustainable model has allowed us to support more than 2 million cleft surgeries in 95+ countries since our founding in 1999, and we're still just getting started.

We are truly changing the world one smile at a time!

Make a Difference!

As Smile Train's Vice President, Program Operations, you will serve as a senior leader within the Global Programs division, providing strategic and operational leadership to ensure global program priorities are effectively planned, coordinated, executed, and measured.

Reporting to Smile Train's Chief Impact Officer and working closely with Programs leadership, regional leaders, and colleagues across Smile Train, the Vice President, Program Operations will provide oversight of program operations, work plans, budgets, forecasting, risk management, partner management, and key organizational deliverables. The Vice President will lead and develop a team of professionals across specialized program areas while strengthening coordination, accountability, and operational excellence across the division.

A critical component of this role is connecting strategy with execution. The Vice President will ensure that program activities remain aligned with organizational priorities, that leadership has timely and accurate information to support decision-making, and that collaboration between Programs, regional teams, and other headquarters functions is coordinated and effective. The role will also champion the use of data, dashboards, and management tools to strengthen program performance, accountability, and continuous improvement.

• Provide strategic and operational leadership across key global Programs initiatives, ensuring priorities, work plans, timelines, and deliverables remain aligned and on track.
• Oversee program budget planning, forecasting, monitoring, and timely and accurate financial submissions in partnership with Programs leadership and Finance.
• Lead, manage, mentor, and develop a team of professionals across specialized program areas, including research, speech, ENT, nutrition, and other program functions.
• Establish clear priorities, performance expectations, and accountability while supporting the professional growth and development of team members.
• Serve as a senior liaison between Programs and other headquarters functions, ensuring cross-functional requests, projects, and initiatives are appropriately coordinated and strategically aligned.
• Partner with regional leadership in the development and review of annual plans, budgets, regional work plans, and program priorities.
• Provide strategic and operational input regarding the feasibility, scalability, sustainability, and implementation requirements of proposed program initiatives.
• Proactively review and flag programmatic and operational risks across the portfolio, working under the supervision of the Chief Impact Officer to resolve issues before they escalated. Monitor partner activities and organizational commitments throughout the year, engage partners as needed to address emerging concerns, and drive timely problem-solving to ensure issues are identified and acted upon well before fiscal year-end.
• Lead the development and utilization of dashboards, reporting tools, and performance measures that provide leadership with timely and actionable information.
• Ensure program data is appropriately collected, managed, analyzed, and used to strengthen decision making…