As a technology leader that is rapidly on the move, HARMAN is filled with people who are focused on making life better. Innovation, inclusivity and teamwork are a part of our DNA. When you add that to the challenges we take on and solve together, you’ll discover that at HARMAN you can grow, make a difference and be proud of the work you do every day.
Introduction: A Career at HARMAN Automotive
We’re a global, multi-disciplinary team that’s putting the innovative power of technology to work and transforming tomorrow. At HARMAN Automotive, we give you the keys to fast-track your career.
- Engineer audio systems and integrated technology platforms that augment the driving experience
- Combine ingenuity, in-depth research, and a spirit of collaboration with design and engineering excellence
- Advance in-vehicle infotainment, safety, efficiency, and enjoyment
About the Role
The AI Portfolio Lead is a senior individual contributor responsible for driving operational excellence, portfolio governance, and execution cadence across a divisional AI portfolio. The role owns the management rhythms that keep AI initiatives aligned, transparent, and moving from demand intake through adoption and value realization, including portfolio dashboards, governance forums, decision logs, action tracking, duplicate-project reviews, risk and dependency tracking, and leadership-ready reporting. This role requires strong program management, analytical, stakeholder management, and communication skills to provide leaders with clear visibility into portfolio health, priorities, decisions, outcomes, and risks while partnering across business, product, technology, finance, change, delivery, and governance teams.
What You Will Do
Portfolio Governance and Operating Cadence
Establish and maintain the divisional AI portfolio operating cadence, including intake reviews, governance forums, leadership reviews, planning cycles, and performance review rhythms.
Manage the divisional AI backlog, including demand intake, prioritization support, cohort planning, readiness tracking, and alignment to business priorities.
Own risk, issue, action, decision, and dependency tracking, including decision logs, action registers, milestone visibility, and follow-through routines so commitments and escalations are visible and addressed.
Lead duplicate-project reviews and portfolio rationalization efforts to identify overlap, improve resource utilization, and align AI investments to the highest-value opportunities.
Executive Reporting, Analytics, and Portfolio Transparency
Develop and maintain executive dashboards, KPIs, scorecards, and portfolio analytics that provide clear visibility into initiative health, performance, risks, decisions, and outcomes.
Prepare leadership-ready portfolio materials that synthesize complex information into concise insights, decision points, and recommended actions.
Drive reporting consistency, data quality, and governance standards across the divisional AI portfolio.
Maintain project hygiene and portfolio transparency across intake, prioritization, delivery, adoption, and value-realization stages.
Change, Adoption, and Enablement
Own business-specific adoption planning, including impacted roles, stakeholder engagement, enablement needs, communications, and reinforcement approach.
Coordinate training reinforcement, leadership talking points, adoption communications, and feedback loops after launch.
Identify adoption risks, resistance patterns, readiness gaps, and operational blockers; recommend practical actions to improve uptake and sustainability.
Facilitate alignment across business, product, technology, finance, delivery, and operational teams to resolve conflicts and optimize portfolio outcomes.
Finance, Value, and Benefits Realization
Partner with business finance and controllership stakeholders to validate baselines, benefit formulas, assumptions, and realized impact.
Support KPI design, including direct and indirect benefit definitions, operational metrics, expected value, and value tracking cadence.
Track expected versus realized value and surface variance drivers when benefits are unclear, delayed, or at risk.
Connect portfolio prioritization and rationalization decisions to business value, resource utilization, and measurable outcomes.
Governance, Risk, and Continuous Improvement
Ensure AI Hub intake submissions are complete, clear, and ready for governance review.
Support risk-tier pre-checks, documentation quality, human oversight planning, controls alignment, and reassessment trigger tracking.
Help business stakeholders understand responsible AI governance requirements and complete them efficiently without slowing responsible innovation.
Continuously improve portfolio management processes, tools, reporting frameworks, and governance practices.
What You Need To Be Successful
Bachelor's degree in Business, Information Systems, Engineering, Project Management, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience, with 6+ years of experience in PMO, program management, portfolio governance, business operations, or transformation.
Experience establishing operating cadence, governance forums, leadership reviews, planning cycles, performance routines, or portfolio management rhythms.
Strong background in stakeholder management, prioritization, issue tracking, dependency management, action tracking, decision logs, and leadership-ready reporting.
Proven ability to create executive dashboards, KPIs, scorecards, portfolio analytics, and data-driven insights that support strategic decision making.
Experience preparing senior-leadership materials and synthesizing complex portfolio information into concise, actionable recommendations.
Experience supporting change management, adoption planning, communications, training reinforcement, or role-based enablement.
Working knowledge of benefit tracking, KPI design, baseline validation, assumptions, realized impact, and controllership review.
Exposure to Digital, AI, technology, enterprise transformation, governance, risk, compliance, documentation, controls, or responsible AI operating processes.
Ability to work independently in ambiguity, create structure, influence cross-functional teams, and drive follow-through without direct authority.
Critical Skills
Program governance, PMO discipline, operating cadence design, prioritization, and portfolio management hygiene.
Executive reporting, portfolio analytics, dashboard design, KPI design, scorecards, and data quality management.
Risk, issue, action, decision, and dependency tracking, escalation management, and follow-through discipline.
Stakeholder management, executive communication, concise storytelling, and cross-functional alignment.
Change management, communication planning, training reinforcement, role-based enablement, and behavioral adoption.
Finance partnership, benefit formulas, baseline validation, direct and indirect value tracking, and realized impact measurement.
Governance operations, documentation quality, risk awareness, intake readiness, human oversight planning, and reassessment triggers.
Portfolio and reporting tool proficiency, such as Power BI, Jira, Azure DevOps, Smartsheet, Microsoft Power Platform, or similar tools.
Success Measures
The divisional AI operating cadence is established, consistently maintained, and useful to leadership decision making.
The AI backlog is current, prioritized, rationalized, and tied to clear business ownership, value hypotheses, and resource considerations.
Executive dashboards, KPIs, scorecards, and portfolio materials provide trusted visibility into status, risks, dependencies, actions, decisions, and outcomes.
Duplicate-project reviews and portfolio rationalization efforts reduce overlap and improve alignment of AI investments to business priorities.
AI initiatives are prepared with complete intake, visible dependencies, validated assumptions, adoption readiness, and clear next steps.
Adoption plans are reinforced after launch, value tracking is finance-aligned, and governance documentation stays current.
Ideal Candidate Profile
The ideal candidate is a structured, business-oriented operator who can bring order, transparency, and momentum to a fast-moving AI portfolio without adding unnecessary bureaucracy. They combine PMO rigor, executive communication, analytical judgment, change-management discipline, financial fluency, and practical responsible-AI awareness to help the business adopt AI in ways that are measurable, sustainable, and well controlled.
What Makes You Eligible
- Ability to work from an office in Novi, MI, 3+ days per week (hybrid)
- Successfully complete a background investigation and drug screen as a condition of employment
What We Offer
- Access to employee discounts on world-class products (JBL, HARMAN Kardon, AKG, and more)
- Extensive training opportunities through our own HARMAN University
- Competitive wellness benefits
- Tuition reimbursement
- “Be Brilliant” employee recognition and rewards program
- An inclusive and diverse work environment that fosters and encourages professional and personal development
Salary Ranges:
HARMAN is proud to be an Equal Opportunity / Affirmative Action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.
Skills Required
- Bachelor's degree in Business, Information Systems, Engineering, Project Management, or related field, or equivalent experience
- 6+ years of experience in PMO, program management, portfolio governance, business operations, or transformation
- Experience establishing operating cadence, governance forums, leadership reviews, planning cycles, and portfolio management rhythms
- Strong stakeholder management, prioritization, issue tracking, dependency management, action tracking, and decision log skills
- Proven ability to create executive dashboards, KPIs, scorecards, portfolio analytics, and data-driven insights
- Experience preparing senior-leadership materials and synthesizing complex portfolio information into concise recommendations
- Experience supporting change management, adoption planning, communications, training reinforcement, or role-based enablement
- Working knowledge of benefit tracking, KPI design, baseline validation, assumptions, and realized impact measurement
- Exposure to Digital, AI, technology transformation, governance, risk, compliance, documentation, controls, or responsible AI processes
- Proficiency with portfolio and reporting tools such as Power BI, Jira, Azure DevOps, Smartsheet, Microsoft Power Platform, or similar
- Ability to work from an office in Novi, MI, at least 3 days per week (hybrid)
- Successful completion of a background investigation and drug screen as a condition of employment
Harman Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Harman and has not been reviewed or approved by Harman.
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Healthcare Strength — Healthcare coverage is described as comprehensive, often including medical, dental, and vision plans, with HSAs/FSAs and disability or life insurance also referenced. Wellbeing support such as EAP access and onsite occupational health services is also part of the package in some regions.
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Wellbeing & Lifestyle Benefits — Lifestyle-oriented benefits include employee product discounts and region-specific perks like free fruit deliveries, Cycle to Work schemes, and meal coupons or allowances. Flexible schedules and work-from-home options are also part of the overall offering where roles and projects allow.
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Fair & Transparent Compensation — Pay is repeatedly characterized as solid or market-aligned for many roles, with salary payments described as consistent and on time. Compensation is also tied to performance in some accounts, reinforcing a perception of basic fairness for a portion of employees.
Harman Insights
What We Do
Headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, HARMAN (harman.com) designs and engineers connected products and solutions for automakers, consumers, and enterprises worldwide, including connected car systems, audio and visual products, enterprise automation solutions; and services supporting the Internet of Things. With leading brands including AKG®, Harman Kardon®, Infinity®, JBL®, Lexicon®, Mark Levinson® and Revel®, HARMAN is admired by audiophiles, musicians and the entertainment venues where they perform around the world. More than 50 million automobiles on the road today are equipped with HARMAN audio and connected car systems. Our software services power billions of mobile devices and systems that are connected, integrated and secure across all platforms, from work and home to car and mobile. HARMAN has a workforce of approximately 30,000 people across the Americas, Europe, and Asia. In March 2017, HARMAN became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. HARMAN is an Equal Opportunity, Affirmative Action employer. Minorities, women, veterans and individuals with disabilities are encouraged to apply. HARMAN offers a great work environment, challenging career opportunities, professional training and competitive compensation. Looking for a challenge where your experience is valued? Come see what you can achieve as a leader with HARMAN!
