Director - Project Management - FareCompare - Dallas

Job description
Serve as a lead executive in the build-out of a new B2B line-of-business, to be structured as a sister organization of a well-established and successful B2C company
Report directly to the Vice President of Strategy and Alliances
Coordinate with the CIO through a dotted-line reporting relationship
Assist the executive team in corporate governance of progress against this business strategy
Provide technical consulting to B2B clients (to include airlines, hoteliers, online travel agencies, cruise lines, destination marketing organizations, and destination activities) with regards to the integration of the B2B system with the client’s internal environment
Identify technologies, whether available on the market or requiring custom development, which further enable the achievement of the business strategy
Provide executive team with reporting on development status, raising awareness of any barriers and proactively working to find their resolution
Coordinate the activities and progress of an offshore / outsourced software development team
Collaborate with offshore team to scale up or scale down the level of resource assigned to FareCompare as per the required pace or scope of development, as forecasted by Director of Technology on a rolling basis over the next 8 – 16 weeks
Collaborate with FareCompare’s executive team and legal counsel, in coordination with offshore team, to ensure the protection of FareCompare’s intellectual property
Validate accuracy of invoices received from offshore team, coordinate within FareCompare’s process for payment approval, and liaise with finance department to ensure efficient processing of international bank transfers to the offshore company
Participate in daily stand-ups with offshore team, providing guidance that enables the developers to proceed without delay in building applications and integrations for which the baseline (phase 1) business requirements have already been documented, and quickly gathering additional guidance from within FareCompare or its partners when offshore developers require subject matter expertise
Build business requirements, functional specifications, and development stories for phase 2 of development and beyond
Collaborate internally and externally to refine SLA’s against which the offshore team is accountable; raise awareness of any yellow or red lights with leadership and proactively work to return the SLA to its agreed measure
Customize a quality assurance process, connecting FareCompare’s internal QA processes with the offshore’s process, for validation of each iteration’s delivery
Track the quality of each iteration’s delivery, with identification of trends in accuracy for each individual offshore development programmer; raise awareness of performance concerns with offshore team and FareCompare leadership, and work proactively to find their resolution
Lead the change management process and realign scope, target dates, and resources accordingly
Should a technical “crisis” occur within the solutions under the purview of the Director of Project Management, she or he will coordinate with internal and external resources to ensure escalation and speedy resolution
Learn the FareCompare systems’ architecture and capabilities; keep up-to-date on the progress and activities of other software development departments and research teams across the FareCompare organization

FareCompare offers the following competitive benefits to all full-time staff:
Health, Dental and Vision insurance
401(k) Savings plan with matching company contributions
Generous paid-time off for full-time employees

Desired Skills and Experience

Intuition and acumen to perfect upon an informed business strategy, align it with the appropriate technical solutions (both internally and externally), translate strategy into business requirements and functional specifications, and decompose into development stories that can be consumed within an agile / scrum environment
Experience in providing technical integration consulting to Fortune Global 1000 clients as well as to small- and mid-sized organizations in a B2B service delivery model
Expertise in managing the design, development, deployment, and performance of highly complex software systems with multiple integration points between internal and external solutions
Very strong orientation (and a yearning to understand the granular yet relevant details) in tracking, reporting on, and connecting the status / progress of multiple development efforts; ideally, would have experience working with Rally Software as the platform for coordinating development
PMI certification or equivalent a plus
Experience having served as key liaison within a firm to its external partner in offshore / outsourced software development; that is, it is important that the Director of Project Management has experience having acted in the role of the customer, who was receiving outsourced information technology services
Experience in coordinating the work of multiple software development teams, ideally having built a bridge between an internal development process to an externally-sourced development team
Background in airline data, including air fare pricing / itinerary construction / RBD inventory management, a very large plus
A very large plus if have background in any of the following: algorithms to fine-tune comparison shopping engines, PPC/SEM bid optimization engines, retargeting and DSP auctions, and/or dynamic personalization algorithms within an ESP messaging environment such as ExactTarget or Responsys
Eye that can contribute to usability factors and intuitive UX design a plus
Portuguese speaker a plus
Multiple trips to Sao Paulo, Brazil, will be required per year

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