Job Title: Program Manager (Events Operations)
Client Location: Remote – must be UK based
Starting: July 2026
Pay Comments: Ltd ONLY
Minimum Pay (per day): £350.00
Maximum Pay (per day): £410.00
Duration: 6 months
Job Description:
This role requires strong program management and transformation experience. The client is looking for someone who can dive into complex systems and design scalable structures to improve how they operate. Deep experience in program-level ownership and transformation is essential.
This role builds and runs that operating system. It is a pure program and operations role – the person designing and maintaining the intake, planning, budgeting, reporting and governance that lets a small team operate calmly a year in advance.
Important: this role does not plan or deliver events. Client’s internal team and agency partner do that. You build and run the system they work within – the rails, not the train. Your success is measured by how well the people delivering events are supported, not by events you personally run.
What you’ll own
A single source of truth and portfolio visibility
•Design and maintain one authoritative view of the entire events portfolio – status, owners, milestones, dependencies and risk – that leadership and stakeholders can trust without chasing.
•Consolidate current tooling (Smartsheet, Monday.com, Adobe Workfront) into a single, maintained system of record, and retire the standalone spreadsheets that hold stale information.
•Build and run a regular portfolio status cadence so “where do things stand?” is always already answered.
•Maintain an internal (business-wide) information landing page, that helps to answers questions about our events organisation before people reach out directly.
Intake and demand governance
•Replace “anyone can email and it gets built” with a structured intake process: every request is captured, qualified, prioritised and tiered before work begins.
•Design – and, with the Strategic Events Lead, apply – a clear prioritisation and event-tiering framework so the team’s effort matches strategic value, and so the portfolio can be right-sized over time.
•Own the governance that ensures requests are challenged against strategy before resources are committed.
Reporting cadence and stakeholder governance
•Establish the governance for how business and senior commercial stakeholders engage – where their input belongs (goals, audience, outcomes) and where it doesn’t (overriding delivery decisions) — and hold that line with the backing of the Strategic Events Lead.
•Create reporting formats clear enough that anyone, at any level, can see status and outcomes without a meeting.
Planning, capacity and resourcing systems
•Build the rolling 12-month planning framework that lets the team plan ahead while events are live on the ground.
•Replace end-to-end solo ownership with shared-ownership and clean-handoff models — designing how work is distributed, not taking the work yourself.
•Protect deliberate “work out loud” time — internal briefs, decks, debriefs — by building it into the plan.
Process, cadence and playbooks
•Stand up reliable internal milestone calendars the team and agency hit — artwork, briefing, ticketing and the other deadlines currently missed almost every time.
•Redefine repeatable playbooks and templates (briefs, run-of-show, post-event reports) so each event isn’t reinvented from scratch.
•Own the operating cadence: planning checkpoints, status reviews and retrospectives that drive continuous improvement and a more consistent brand experience.
Agency operating model
•Support senior leadership in defining the operating model and handoffs between internal strategy and agency execution and manage the agency relationship at the process and governance level — timelines, deliverables, budget tracking and quality standards — rather than day-to-day production.
What we’re looking for
Must have
•Demonstrated program/operations or PMO experience designing and running process across multiple concurrent workstreams.
•A track record of building systems and bringing order to ambiguous, reactive environments – this is a build role, not an execution role.
•Change-management instinct: getting people to adopt new ways of working without relying on formal authority.
•Confident stakeholder management, including setting expectations and pushing back constructively with senior people.
•Fluency in project management tooling (e.g. Monday.com, Smartsheet, Workfront) and a bias toward a single source of truth over spreadsheet sprawl.
•Excellent written and verbal communication – clear briefs, clean status reporting, crisp executive updates.
Nice to have
•Background in or exposure to events, experiential, brand or marketing (helpful context, but this is not an events-delivery role).
•Experience defining operating models with external agencies or production partners.
•Familiarity with Figma and the Microsoft toolset.
•A relevant PM/operations credential (PMP, PRINCE2, PMI-ACP or similar) — useful, not required.
How you work
•Systems thinker who is calm amid other people’s deadline pressure.
•Organised and proactive — you design for the deadline rather than react to it.
•Collaborative and diplomatic, but firm about process and standards.
•Comfortable owning the unglamorous connective work that makes other people look great.
What success looks like
•Leadership and stakeholders have real-time visibility into the portfolio without asking.
•Events are requested through a clear process, prioritised against strategy, and right-sized over time.
•Internal deadlines are hit consistently; the team has room to plan and brief properly.
•Executive sponsors receive timely pre- and post-event reporting as a matter of course.
•The team collaborates and shares load instead of carrying events alone – and the brand experience is consistently strong.
*This role is open for a limited time. Next steps will be shared with shortlisted candidates ASAP. Due to the high volume of applicants, we may be unable to reply to each applicant individually. Thank you for taking the time to apply.
Client: A multinational travel management company headquartered in New York City.
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