Senior Programme Manager - Associate Director

About Us

Ascent has recently been acquired by Acuity Analytics . This is both a significant milestone for us and a tremendous opportunity for you.

Acuity Analytics is a business with a strong global reputation, an impressive client base, and ambitious growth plans. We deliver deep insights and domain-led digital transformation to high-growth and heavily regulated organisations. To our customers, we bring a partnership that provides the talent, technology, and capability to enhance performance and operational efficiency.

As part of our continued growth, we are looking for a Senior Programme Manager to provide end-to-end leadership for an enterprise-grade legacy modernization programme within a Banking & Capital Markets environment.

About the Role

You will be responsible for driving modernization of business-critical legacy platforms, applications, data flows, integrations, operating processes, and supporting technology capabilities — while ensuring continuity of service, regulatory compliance, operational resilience, and measurable business outcomes.

The ideal candidate will bring strong experience leading large-scale legacy-to-modern transformation initiatives across complex enterprise environments, including mainframe or monolithic platform modernization, data migration, API-led integration, cloud or hybrid adoption, vendor and SI management, governance, risk management, change adoption, cutover, hyper-care, and transition to sustainable business-as-usual operations.

Skills and Experience Required

Core Skills (must-have):

• Enterprise legacy modernization programme leadership
• Cloud / hybrid migration and application modernization

• Stakeholder

  management

• Regulated financial-services delivery governance

Nice to Have:

• Mainframe or monolithic platform modernization exposure
• Domain-Driven Design and Strangler Pattern migration governance.
• Banking / capital markets domain knowledge
• Target operating model, service transition and legacy decommissioning experience

Key Competencies:

• Strong programme management experience leading complex, enterprise-scale legacy modernization, platform transformation, data modernization, or technology simplification initiatives.
• Good understanding of legacy-to-modern delivery patterns, including mainframe or monolithic modernization, cloud or hybrid migration, data migration, API-led integration, application remediation, parallel run, cutover, and decommissioning.
• Excellent senior stakeholder management, executive communication, facilitation, negotiation, and relationship-building skills across business, technology, risk, compliance, operations, vendors, and implementation partners.
• Strong client expectation management skills, including the ability to manage senior client conversations, communicate trade-offs, handle ambiguity, resolve escalations, and maintain trust during complex modernization delivery.
• Strong governance, operating model, RAID, dependency, decision, escalation, financial, resource, vendor, and benefits management capabilities.
• Ability to manage programme-level scope, priorities, sequencing, modernization trade-offs, technical constraints, regulatory commitments, budgets, timelines, and executive reporting.
• Experience working with Agile, Waterfall, and Hybrid delivery models, including large-scale enterprise release planning, integrated testing, migration rehearsals, readiness reviews, and hyper-care governance.
• Ability to coordinate distributed, cross-functional teams across business, architecture, engineering, QA, DevOps, infrastructure, data, cyber security, operations, risk, compliance, support, and third-party delivery functions.
• Strong planning, prioritization, organizational, analytical, and problem-solving skills across competing stakeholder needs, unclear requirements, technical debt, and delivery constraints.
• Ability to convert complex modernization information into concise leadership updates, actionable insights, risk-based recommendations, and clear decision points.
• Strong focus on business outcomes, delivery discipline, accountability, adoption, service continuity, documentation, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
• Comfortable operating in business-critical, high-availability environments where transparency, resilience, production stability, auditability, and stakeholder confidence are essential.
• Ability to proactively identify modernization risks, unblock dependencies, s…