Software Engineering Project Manager

Software Engineering Project Manager
Reports to: VP of Product
Location: Remote – US preferred; offshore candidates will be considered
Employment Type: Full-time
Experience Level: 4+ years technical project / production program management; PMP required
Salary Range: $90,000 - $105,000 salary, plus equity & benefits, based on experience (adjusted regionally)
Industry: Digital Distribution Platforms, Communications, AI, Gaming, Mobile Development, Platform as a Service, Payment Systems (on-chain)
Stakeholders: Engineering, Design, Trust & Safety, Leadership
Required: Ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly in English.
NOTE: Haiven is located in Washington State. Legal U.S. citizens and residents are preferred. If offshore, you must be available at least 3 hours each day during afternoons in the U.S. Pacific Time Zone.
About the Role
We are hiring an experienced Software Engineering Project Manager to support the VP of Product as the delivery coordinator for engineering. You will sequence work, translate architecture into component-level plans, lock scope, forecast effort honestly, and run the operating cadence of a small team shipping a real-time, AI-protected gaming and community platform.
You report to the VP of Product. Success is measured by how much more efficient and effective Product and Engineering become. You protect the VP of Product’s time so it is spent on vision, partners, players, developers, and key strategic decisions. You will sit in engineering discussions as Product’s technical counterpart. You will not write production Go. You will talk about the work at the same resolution our engineers do.
Who we Are
Haiven is a real-time social and distribution platform: a Go backend (monolith designed to scale into microservices), PostgreSQL, WebSocket chat / DM / presence / notifications, NATS and JetStream event pipelines for signals and our trust-and-safety engine, AWS (ECS, S3, CloudFront, Cognito, CloudWatch), containerized delivery, React Native mobile clients (iOS/Android), and a SolidJS client. Developers integrate through an SDK aimed at Unity, Unreal, React Native, Roblox, and Discord. The product includes identity and permissions, studio and publishing workflows, a virtual economy and on-chain payouts, AI discovery and vibe scoring, and protection-by-design safety infrastructure. The ideal candidate understands CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, and first-principles design, and respects the engineering process.
What You’ll Do
Own the delivery system: roadmap translation, milestone plans, dependency maps, risk logs, and weekly progress that leadership can trust.
Sit in engineering discussions as Product’s technical counterpart so the VP of Product is not required for daily implementation conversations.
Bring component-level forecasts for services, schemas, SDK surfaces, event pipelines, and infrastructure work, with ranges, assumptions, and options to refine scope, time, and cost.
Hold scope after a decision is made. When new ideas arrive, help Product choose now, next, or later, with the cost of changing the plan made explicit.
Separate discovery from commitment. Offer “I don’t know, I’ll find out” with reliable follow-up so the team does not guess.
Translate company and product priorities into executable work with clear owners, acceptance criteria, and sequenced dependencies.
Assist with planning, standups, reviews, and retros that are short, specific, and useful.
Maintain on-demand status of Alpha, Beta, and launch milestones. Surface slips early, with options, not surprises. Use Atlassian Rovo and other AI tools to do so.
Coordinate work across backend, frontend, SDK, infrastructure, AI/trust-and-safety, design, and global development partners.
Improve intake, estimation, code-review expectations, deploy windows, and incident follow-through as the team grows.
Keep a written record of decisions, open questions, and change history so the team is not dependent on anyone’s memory, including Product’s.
Keep tracking and reporting lightweight.
Read architecture and pull-request conversations well enough to challenge a date, a missing dependency, or the claim that a change is small.
Forecast effort at the component level: API surface, schema migration, queue consumer, WebSocket path, Cognito/auth flow, SDK binding, infrastructure change, observability, and rollback.
Help engineers evaluate implementation approaches and make the tradeoff visible to Product in plain language: time, risk, operability, and later cost.
Plan environments, promotions, feature flags, and release trains.
Participate in incident response by keeping communication, owners, and follow-up tight.
Who You Are
PMP certified, with working command of WBS thinking, critical path, risk registers, change control, and stakeholder maps, applied with a light touch.
4+ years running technical delivery for production software, ideally on a SaaS, PaaS, or cloud-native platform (AWS or similar).
Engineering literacy sufficient for frank conversations about effort: backend systems, APIs, data models, real-time or high-concurrency workloads, auth/identity, CI/CD, and production operations.
Experience supporting teams that used Go or another strongly typed backend language; AWS (ECS or similar compute, object storage, CDN, managed identity); containers and infrastructure-as-code; event-driven systems; messaging or social products.
Experience in startups or small teams (ideally two or more) where process was still being invented, and you improved it without installing a PMO nobody asked for.
A gamer, or genuine respect for games as culture, including why chat, discovery, loot, studios, and safety are not separate products.
Clear written and verbal communication: a paragraph for leadership, a thread for an engineer.
Personable and respectful under pressure. You correct the work, not the people.
Motivated by team success and collective outcomes.
Preferred Qualifications
4+ years software engineering or technical project management for production software.
PMP plus a second credential or practiced method (CSM/PSM, SAFe, or a hybrid you can defend).
Understanding of the type and usage of Haiven’s specific tech stack components.
Experience improving CI/CD, release, and developer workflows.
Familiarity with SDK or platform products used by external developers.
Experience around trust and safety, moderation, or high-stakes production operations.
Experience helping engineering hit a public launch date without torching the team.
What we offer
Salary range: $90,000 - $105,000 salary (adjusted regionally), benefits, and equity based on relevant experience and final scope of role.
High ownership and impact in a small team environment.
Close collaboration with engineering and product teams.
Opportunity to grow with the company as the platform scales.
Work on a product used by real developers and players in the gaming community.
Haiven is an Equal Opportunity Employer, committed to a discrimination and harassment-free workplace. Employment decisions are based on business needs, job requirements, and individual qualifications, regardless of demographic characteristics or geographic location. We promote meritocracy values, including: active collaboration, clear communication, relentless follow-up, intelligent risk-taking, forbearance, forgiveness, and an ongoing celebration of excellence.
More on Haiven
Visit www.haiven.gg for details on our company, team, customers, products, and culture.
How to Apply
Tell us why you're a perfect fit for this role by applying on LinkedIn and completing the Survey Questions.
Thank you for your interest in joining Haiven!

Work arrangement
Yes