Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Variate is looking for a Senior Project Manager to lead the operations of high-impact brand, product, and customer experience engagements for ambitious global organizations. The role involves managing multiple client projects, creating clarity in complex scopes, and ensuring teams deliver against business and customer expectations while maintaining quality and trust.
Responsibilities
- Own the engagement: Manage several client projects simultaneously from onboarding through completion. Establish the plan, maintain momentum, and ensure teams deliver against clear business, customer, schedule, and financial expectations
- Create clarity: Translate complex scopes, conversations, and dependencies into clear priorities, responsibilities, timelines, and next steps. Make sure every person understands what is happening, why it matters, and what they need to do next
- Protect outcomes: Keep teams focused on the decisions and outcomes that matter most. Identify when activity is drifting away from the client’s goals and redirect the work before momentum is lost
- Lead project planning: Build and maintain project plans, schedules, staffing models, budgets, forecasts, decision logs, risk registers, and status reporting across multiple concurrent engagements
- Manage scope and margin: Track progress against statements of work, budgets, staffing assumptions, and sold-in margin. Surface scope changes early and work with leadership to resolve them before they affect delivery or client trust
- Anticipate risk: Identify unclear ownership, missing decisions, stakeholder misalignment, timeline pressure, and resource constraints before they become delivery problems
- Drive client communication: Lead status meetings, working sessions, and project communications with confidence. Document decisions, clarify responsibilities, and close every meeting with agreed next steps and timing
- Align multidisciplinary teams: Coordinate strategists, researchers, UX designers, brand designers, writers, analysts, and client stakeholders without adding unnecessary process
- Maintain operating rhythm: Establish a consistent cadence for internal reviews, client reviews, executive checkpoints, project health reporting, and financial updates
- Move fast with discipline: Use AI and project management tools to improve planning, synthesis, documentation, forecasting, and communication without reducing judgment or accountability
Skills
- Proven project leadership: 5+ years managing complex digital, product, brand, CX, or design engagements in an agency, consultancy, or similarly fast-paced client environment
- Multi-project command: Demonstrated experience managing several active projects, teams, timelines, and budgets at the same time
- Operational precision: Strong command of project planning, resource coordination, budget tracking, forecasting, scope management, risk management, and executive reporting
- Client confidence: Clear, composed, and credible communication with senior client stakeholders. You can lead difficult conversations without creating unnecessary friction
- Commercial awareness: You understand how scope, staffing, utilization, margin, timing, and client satisfaction affect the health of an engagement
- Decision discipline: You know the difference between activity and progress. You clarify decisions, document commitments, and ensure unresolved questions have owners
- Strong judgment: You recognize when to solve a problem independently, when to involve leadership, and when a project requires a direct conversation
- High accountability: You take ownership of outcomes. You do not wait for someone else to notice that a deadline, decision, or relationship is at risk
- Tool fluency: Experience with project management, documentation, communication, financial tracking, and collaboration platforms. You learn new systems quickly and maintain excellent data hygiene
- You have managed several client engagements with competing deadlines without allowing quality or communication to decline
- You have led projects involving UX, product design, brand, research, content, technology, or design systems
- You have managed fixed-fee and time-and-materials engagements
- You have improved a project management process that increased delivery speed, predictability, margin, or client satisfaction
- You have identified scope or delivery risk early and successfully realigned the client and internal team
- You have experience supporting enterprise organizations with complex stakeholder groups, approval structures, or governance requirements
- You understand that project management is not administrative support. It is the design of the conditions in which teams make good decisions
Benefits
- Consistent, long-term contract work with contract-to-hire potential.
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