Director, Professional Services Delivery

The Position

Do you dream about creating a more sustainable future? At Uplight, we are motivating energy users and providers to accelerate the clean energy ecosystem. Working with over 90 of the world’s leading electric and gas utilities, Uplight provides an end-to-end customer energy experience. Uplight delivers personalized experiences that customers have now come to expect–improving satisfaction, increasing revenue, reducing the cost to serve, and contributing to carbon reduction goals. We are B Corp certified, enabling us to put our values into action by not only making decisions for the benefit of our shareholders, but also for our customers, environment, employees, and community.

We are seeking a Director of Professional Services Delivery to join our team and help us achieve our ambitious goals for our business and the planet.

What you get to do:

As the Director of Professional Services Delivery on the Professional Services Team, you will be responsible for helping to establish a new framework for managing professional services programs and projects that are core to delivering customer value for the unique requirements that our clients and their customers need to make our software work in their environments.  You will directly manage a team of program and project managers in the PS group, and indirectly help to orchestrate the larger group of Uplight capabilities to contract, plan, resource and execute on PS project work.  You’ll be a part of mentoring, coaching, and supporting a talented and passionate group. You will be accountable for achieving target results across your program’s scope, including managing to overall portfolio revenue and cost goals.

Professional Services is a new department at Uplight, and you will be an agent of change across PS, implementation, product, engineering and our other key stakeholders. You will help establish new frameworks for how we work, planning the work and overseeing the implementation and ongoing management of those projects, including establishing senior customer relationships to help support the team and ongoing work.  The PS Delivery team leads the development of project delivery plans/scenarios, project management, management of other resources at Uplight on projects, monitoring and reporting on the program’s status, tracking dependencies, and facilitating tradeoff and prioritization conversations with cross functional teams.  Successful people in this role will be willing to roll up their sleeves and manage projects themselves when needed to help capacity or demonstrate new models and techniques to the team.

In this role, you will get to work with a team of PS Managers who will be based in North America and globally, who are responsible for the lifecycle management of our essential products..

To be successful, you’ll need to collaborate with external stakeholders and Uplight Product, Engineering, Sales, Marketing, Finance, Operations, Implementation, and Client Success teams. The right candidate needs to be adept and effective at cross functional communication and coordination. You will need to be comfortable operating at both the strategic level (e.g. process improvement; long-term planning; etc) and at the tactical level (e.g. resolving client issues).

Skills and experience are necessary, but we hire on value alignment first, so if you feel you would be a good fit with us, still consider applying.

International travel is required, as needed.

What you will contribute:

• Manage a team of program and project managers with the overall responsibility of contracting and delivering client projects to meet revenue, cost, time and scope expectations.
• Develop and continuously improve a project management process that the team will use to successfully deliver and report on projects, using experience and best practices of similar industry professional service organizations.
• Hire, train, develop, grow and retain highly motivated, talented Uplight PMs.  Working for you should be a springboard for the careers of the people on your team.
• Work with Account Management, Sales and other leads to address senior client relationships, including both opportunities and escalations.
• Collaborate to develop relationships and processes that enable strong PS delivery from other functional areas within the Uplight organization, including engineering, product, standard implementation, data and other groups.  Processes include project planning, process improvement, resource management, PS accounting and more.
• Plan and oversee the projects within your portfolio, and provide support to team members on those projects as needed.
• Support product and client roadmap based on execution and learnings from projects, including recommendations and advocacy for features, operational efficiencies, automation, configurations, reporting, tech debt reduction, and improving performance.
• Develop standard training and materials to help enable more scalable work across the professional services group, quickly onboard new team members, and lead clients through execution.
• Represent cross-functional leadership during the sales process on behalf of Professional Services
• Maintain a rolling 6-12 month forecast of the projected Implementation, engineering and operational staffing capacity needs for your portfolio; refresh as new projects enter the program, as products or projects retire, and incorporate high probability sales deals into forecasts.
• Overall responsibility for financial and operational performance of the project portfolio, including revenue, cost, scope and delivery time.

What you bring to Uplight:

• Minimum of 8 years of project management and/or program management experience, preferably in a technology professional services company.
• Experience managing a team of project managers and a portfolio of projects.
• Outstanding leadership and management skills.  You help to drive a sense of team and have shown the ability to grow and develop individual talent.
• Exceptional project, program, and client management skills and ability to handle highly complex, multi-project engagements.
• Excellent analytical, technical, and problem-solving skills, tenacity, and fortitude.
• You are able to weigh several and often conflicting constraints and make rapid decisions in a fast-moving and quickly-growing company.
• An ability to develop relationships across the organization in support of efficient delivery of work.
• Patient, communicative, team player that is detail-oriented and has outstanding interpersonal skills.
• You are highly organized. With many people doing many things in a fast-moving company, strong organizational skills—both for yourself and for the team—will be required.
• Not be afraid to dig into hard problems and be proactive in tackling those problems.
• Ability to handle ambiguity.
• Committed to high quality and high value results.
• Be ready, able, and willing to jump onto a call with a partner or customer to help solve problems.

Bonus Points:

• Be passionate about energy consumption and making a difference in the world.
• Prior experience working at a high growth software company in the energy or utility space.
• Prior experience in data pipelines, ETL, and/or analytics.

What makes working at Uplight amazing:

In addition to all the standard medical and dental benefits, that kick in Day 1, we are:

• Proud to be over 500+ purpose-driven individuals helping to create a more sustainable planet.
• Committed to the environment, our employees, and our communities.
• Focused on career growth by following defined career ladders.
• Committed to taking our work and mission seriously and….we love to laugh!

We also provide:

• 401k Match
• Medical, vision, and dental insurance
• Monthly wellness stipend
• Peer to peer recognition program
• Management by objectives bonus plan
• Innovative flexible time off policy
• Exceptionally collaborative and cool office spaces

Salary: $156,000-$168,000 USD

In accordance with the Colorado Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, the approximate annual base compensation range is listed above. The actual offer, reflecting the total compensation package and benefits, will be determined by a number of factors including the applicant's experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities, as well as internal equity among our team.

Uplight provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race (including hair texture and hairstyles), color, religion (including head coverings), age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.