Project Manager

Remote; San Francisco (CA); Remote; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Mactores is seeking a Project Manager to lead distributed engineering teams across India and three US time zones on customer engagements with fixed delivery dates. You’ll run daily stand-ups, sprint planning, and cross-functional reviews, translating technical progress into business language and keeping the project plan defensible and on track.

You will own risk, RAID logs, change processes, and escalations, pushing back on scope creep with data, tracking burn-rate, and ensuring milestones are

Qualifications

• 3+ years of delivery experience on cloud engineering or data engineering projects.
• Hands-on fluency with Smartsheet, Jira / Confluence, and Clockify — you can stand up the tooling on day one.
• Excellent written and spoken communication, facilitation, negotiation, and coaching skills.
• Strong prioritization and problem-solving instincts.
• A demonstrable track record of driving outcomes, not just reporting on them.
• Demonstrated experience managing at least one fixed-bid project from kickoff through closure, including scope change negotiation with clients.
• A strong grasp of Agile delivery metrics — velocity, burndown, sprint predictability.

Responsibilities

• Build the project plan in Smartsheet from the Solutions Architect's scope of work, real dependencies, a defensible critical path, sprint boundaries overlaid on the timeline.
• Track scope, hours, and budget in real time. Flag burn-rate risk early and push back on scope creep with numbers, not gut feel.
• Maintain a live risk register. Surface risks to the client and drive mitigation.
• Maintain a live RAID log and an action tracker with clear ownership and closure.
• Run daily stand-ups, sprint planning, and retrospectives that produce decisions, not discussions.
• Remove sprint blockers personally and chase client-side data dependencies to avoid delays.
• Keep trackers honest with owners and dates; ensure timely closure of actions.
• Translate technical progress into business language for the customer, and business priorities into engineers' requirements.

Skills

Smartsheet

Jira/Confluence

Clockify

Communication

Agile metrics

Tools

Smartsheet

Jira

Confluence

Clockify

Job description

Mactores is the agent-native AWS modernization firm. Most modernization work doesn't ship, it stalls in pilots, slips a year, or lands at three times the budget. We exist to ship it: production systems running, legacy retired, outcomes measured. Our delivery is built on Aedeon, the agent platform built by Mactores' founders' sister company, which absorbs the repetitive 60–70% of engagement work, discovery, dependency mapping, validation, test generation, that traditional consulting bills human hours against. Forward-deployed engineers own the rest: architecture, judgment, and cutover, on dates we commit to in the contract.

We put delivery dates in contracts and carry the overage risk ourselves. That only works if someone owns the delivery-scope, timeline, budget, and sprint execution and treats a slipping date as their problem, not a status-report line item. That someone is you.

As our Project Manager, you'll run distributed engineering teams across India and three US time zones on customer engagements where the date is committed. You'll run the daily, sprint, and client cadences, translate fluently between engineering and business stakeholders, and push back on scope creep with data. Agents compress the repetitive engineering work, which makes delivery faster and makes your job sharper: shorter timelines leave no room for blockers that sit in a log for days. We're looking for the PM who gets things done who personally removes blockers, drives escalations to closure, and makes sure no risk reaches the client as a surprise.

This role is not for you if:

• Your default is to forward messages between the client and engineering.
• Your role has primarily been reporting and coordination without delivery ownership.
• You've only facilitated agile ceremonies without driving delivery outcomes.
• Sprint ownership and execution were largely driven by a Business Analyst or Product Owner in your previous roles.

What you will do?

• Build the project plan in Smartsheet from the Solutions Architect's scope of work, real dependencies, a defensible critical path, sprint boundaries overlaid on the timeline.
• Track scope, hours, and budget in real time. Flag burn-rate risk early and push back on scope creep with numbers, not gut feel.
• Maintain a live risk register. Spot risks before they become issues, surface the right ones to the client at the right time, and drive mitigation actively.
• Maintain a live RAID log (Risks, Assumptions, Issues, Dependencies) and an action tracker with clear ownership, accountability, and timely closure.
• Run crisp daily stand-ups, sprint planning, and retrospectives that produce decisions, not discussions.
• Remove sprint blockers personally. Chase the client-side data dependency, escalated stuck cloud permission, redirect pulled resources don't let "waiting on" sit in a log for days.
• Handle sprint-level risks in real time: reprioritize, descope, swap stories, or upscale before commitments slip.
• Keep trackers honest. Action items have owners and dates; delays are visible and followed up on time.
• Translate technical progress into business language for the customer, and business priorities into clear, estimable requirements for engineers.
• Facilitate internal and external architecture reviews across India and three US time zones; document decisions and circulate them the same day.
• Produce weekly customer status updates a senior business leader can absorb in 90 seconds — RAG colors backed by evidence, not sentiment.
• Own customer escalations and drive them to resolution. Communicate status, risks, and decisions needed — proactively, not reactively.
• Onboard engineers on customer systems, scope, process, deliverables, and documentation standards.
• Create kick-off presentations, project charters, and tracking mechanisms in collaboration with the customer.
• Maintain meeting notes, recorded calls, and a clean project documentation library.
• Review and approve timesheets and leaves; keep capacity planning and team calendar management accurate.
• Negotiate scope changes with data. Produce formal change requests with impact analysis hours, timeline, trade-offs, options before anyone commits the team to additional work.
• Drive sprint predictability with velocity planning and burndown tracking; commitments are realistic and consistently met.
• Run backlog refinement with Principal Consultants or Technical Leads so stories are clear, prioritized, and estimable.

What are we looking for

• 3+ years of delivery experience on cloud engineering or data engineering projects.
• Hands-on fluency with Smartsheet, Jira / Confluence, and Clockify — you can stand up the tooling on day one.
• Excellent written and spoken communication, facilitation, negotiation, and coaching skills — you can hold your ground with a skeptical client engineering director and coach a junior engineer in the same afternoon.
• Strong prioritization and problem-solving instincts. You make trade-offs explicit rather than quietly absorbing them.
• A demonstrable track record of driving outcomes, not just reporting on them.
• Demonstrated experience managing at least one fixed-bid project from kickoff through closure, including scope change negotiation with clients.
• A strong grasp of Agile delivery metrics — velocity, burndown, sprint predictability — and the ability to use them to drive execution.
• Comfort operating in ambiguous, fast-changing environments where requirements evolve; you bring structure proactively.

You will be preferred if you posses

• Experience managing Data Lake projects on AWS.
• Professional Scrum Master (PSM) certification.
• Managing Jira Projects certification.
• Smartsheet certification.

How we work?

Aedeon absorbs scale. Engineers absorb judgment. The contract absorbs risk fixed-date delivery, with Mactores covering overage cost for delays inside our control. You're the person who keeps those three honest on a live engagement: the plan defensible, the burn visible, the risks surfaced before they cost anything. Our engineers embed with the customer's team and carry the delivery commitment personally. You carry the date.

Life at Mactores

We care about creating a culture that makes a real difference in the lives of every Mactorian. Our 10 Core Leadership Principles that honor Decision-making, Leadership, Collaboration, and Curiosity drive how we work.

1. Be one step ahead
2. Deliver the best
3. Be bold
4. Pay attention to the detail
5. Enjoy the challenge
6. Be curious and take action
7. Take leadership
8. Own it
9. Deliver value
10. Be collaborative

We would like you to read more details about the work culture on https://mactores.com/careers

The Path to Joining the Mactores Team

At Mactores, our recruitment process is structured around three distinct stages:

Pre-Employment Assessment:

A series of evaluations of your technical proficiency and suitability for the role.

Managerial Interview:

The hiring manager engages with you in multiple discussions, 30 minutes to an hour each, covering technical skills, hands‑on experience, leadership potential, and communication.

HR Discussion:

During this 30‑minute session, you'll have the opportunity to discuss the offer and next steps with a member of the HR team.

Mactores provides equal opportunities in all employment practices. We don't discriminate based on race, religion, gender, national origin, age, disability, marital status, military status, genetic information, or any other category protected by federal, state, and local laws. This applies to every part of the employment relationship, recruitment, compensation, promotions, transfers, disciplinary action, layoff, training, and social and recreational programs.