Technical Program Manager - NFS

Nelnet is a diversified and innovative company committed to enriching lives through the power of service as a student loan servicer, professional services company, consumer loan originator and servicer, payments processor, renewable energy solutions, and K-12 and higher education expert. For over 40 years, Nelnet has been serving its customers, associates, and communities.

The perks of working at Nelnet go beyond our benefits package. When you join the Nelnet team, you’re part of a community invested in the success of each individual. That support comes through in our work, as we are united by our mission of creating opportunities for people where they live, learn, and work.

Serves as the delivery and coordination lead for the Data Solutions and Engineering team, owning the intake, prioritization, and communication flow between the team and its stakeholders. Leads a small team of analysts, providing day-to-day direction, coaching, and performance management while coordinating their work within the broader team’s roadmap. Manages the team’s work board, roadmap, and documentation standards; facilitates daily and recurring team ceremonies;

and maintains proactive, regular status communication across multiple concurrent data work streams. Requires sufficient technical fluency in data warehousing and analytics to translate ambiguous business requests into well-formed, actionable engineering work. Operates as an embedded member of the team rather than an external project office function.

• Owns team intake. Establishes and maintains a single point of entry for requests and questions; triages incoming work within one business day and either answers it, converts it into a scoped ticket with an assigned owner, or schedules it for a future cycle.
• Leads a small team of analysts: assigns and prioritizes their day-to-day work, provides coaching and developmental feedback, conducts performance reviews, and removes blockers so the team can execute its assigned work streams effectively.
• Translates business requests into well-formed work items with clear scope, acceptance criteria, affected source systems, and definition of done; partners with the Principal Data Engineer on technical scoping and level of effort.
• Maintains the team’s JIRA board as an accurate representation of all active work, including work streams that have historically been tracked outside of JIRA.
• Facilitates daily stand-up and recurring planning and retrospective sessions, keeping them time-boxed and outcome-focused.
• Maintains the team roadmap and delivery calendar; ensures they remain current, visible, and aligned to committed stakeholder dates.
• Serves as the primary communication channel to stakeholder groups, providing proactive scheduled status updates and ensuring no stakeholder learns of a delay or issue after the fact.
• Schedules and drives cross-group working sessions; captures decisions and action items and follows them to closure.
• Re-sequences in-flight work in response to escalations and shifting business priorities within the agreed priority framework; escalates changes to committed scope, stream ownership, or quarterly commitments to the manager.
• Owns documentation and knowledge standards for the team, including Confluence structure, runbooks, data dictionaries, and handoff artifacts; sets and enforces the standard while engineers author domain content.
• Maintains recurring reporting artifacts on data asset status, coverage, and quality posture for leadership and business partners.
• Coordinates validation and business sign-off for data deliverables with the appropriate business owners.
• Tracks and reports delivery metrics, including intake aging, request cycle time, and roadmap adherence; identifies process gaps and…