The Portfolio Operations Engineer plays a pivotal role in managing the daily operations and ensuring data quality. This position holds primary responsibility for leading the first gateway in the software change process. This role is instrumental in ensuring alignment with corporate objectives and strategic initiatives. The Portfolio Operations Engineer acts as a steward of the process, ensuring strategic direction and data integrity, and enables team members to perform their jobs by verifying effective tools and processes are in place. This is a high-touch, high-visibility role, requiring strong communication and collaboration with engineering, product, and business counterparts. This work will directly impact the Feature Strategy team and its partners, enabling them to make informed decisions and operate efficiently. The ideal candidate should be process-minded, organized, highly proficient in Jira and Confluence, and possess a passion for problem-solving.
Key Responsibilities
- Operational Leadership: Act as the Jira back-end expert for the process. Manage user access, process flow, automations, and data integrity with efficiency. Document process flows and critical operations for both end-users and operations team members.
- **Process Optimization: **Identify, design and recommend process improvements to streamline operations, enhance data quality, reduce costs, and increase productivity.
- Helpdesk: Manage the Unified Backlog helpdesk, including reviewing requests, balancing workload to align and implement changes and efficiently track progress.
- Strategic Initiatives & Corporate Objectives: Help drive the strategic direction, aligning with corporate objectives and initiatives. Analyze data to identify objective alignment, inefficiencies, and contribute to strategic planning.
- **Team Success & Objective Achievement: **Define, track, and monitor KPIs and operational metrics to provide insights and measure progress towards team objectives.
- **Process Optimization: **Identify, design and recommend process improvements to streamline operations, enhance data quality, reduce costs, and increase productivity.
- **Stakeholder Alignment & Advocacy: **Engage with and advocate for strategic priorities across engineering, product, and business. Collaborate with cross-functional teams to ensure alignment and effective communication.
- **Cross-functional Meeting Moderation: **Manage topics in stakeholder forums, maintain clear communication, and present findings to leadership.
Education and Work Experience
Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field.
3-4 years of project management experience
- 1-2 years Atlassian tools experience
- Experience in managing the intake, coordination and tracking of change requests
- Experience in ensuring requests meet data integrity standards and program timing coordination
- Experience with data modeling, strategic data analysis, and deriving actionable insights from complex datasets.
Special Skills and Knowledge
Proficient in Atlassian tools including Jira, Analytics, and Confluence
Experienced in global project planning and management
- Experience with data validation and root cause analysis
- Strong critical thinking skills; proactively identify problems and develop solutions
- Research-driven; Ability to create structure and solutions from ambiguous information
- Strong analytical, organizational, and multitasking skills
- Independent, self-motivated, initiative-driven, assertive
- Excellent communication and interpersonal skills
- Collaborative with cross-functional teams
- Committed to Ford+ plan implementation
Preferred Qualifications
Project Management Professional (PMP) certification or equivalent PM certification
- Experience with SAFe