Project Manager

This is not a coordinator role. You are expected to have hands-on experience configuring Jira from scratch, creating projects, designing workflows, setting up custom fields, managing permissions, and building dashboards that the team actually uses. You understand how software development works and can have technical conversations with engineers without needing a translator. You will work alongside the Product Manager, Technical Lead, and CTO to ensure the team delivers against quarterly goals with transparency and without surprises.
Responsibilities:
End-to-end setup and ongoing administration of Jira projects, boards, workflows, issue types, custom fields, automation rules, and permissions.
Sprint planning coordination, working with the Technical Lead and Product Manager to scope, estimate, sequence, and commit work each sprint.
Daily stand-up facilitation, keeping them short, focused, and outcome-oriented; identifying and escalating blockers before they cost a sprint.
Delivery tracking and reporting velocity, sprint completion rate, open blockers, and release readiness communicated clearly to leadership.
Cross-team dependency management flagging conflicts and bottlenecks between Engineering, Product, Design, and Data workstreams.
Maintaining a healthy, groomed backlog in Jira at all times; nothing should be stale or poorly described.
Release planning and go-live coordination, ensuring all parties are aligned and nothing is missed before a launch.
Retrospective facilitation, surfacing real issues, capturing action items, and following through until they are resolved.
Onboarding new team members to the team's delivery processes, Jira workflows, and communication norms.
Requirements:
Experience: 2-4 years of project or programme management experience in a software engineering environment.
Jira: Hands-on Jira configuration is non-negotiable; you have set up projects, custom workflows, and dashboards yourself, not just used them as a contributor.
Agile: Deep understanding of Agile Scrum ceremonies, sprint cadence, velocity tracking, Definition of Done, retrospectives.
Delivery: Demonstrated ability to manage delivery across multiple parallel workstreams without dropping anything.
Communication: Clear, concise written and verbal communication; your status updates are read because they are useful, not because they are required.
Influence: Comfortable challenging engineers, designers, and PMs on timelines and scope with data and clear alternatives, not pressure.
Detail: High attention to detail; you track the things others forget and follow up without being asked.
Startup: Comfortable operating without established playbooks in a startup environment; you build the process, not just follow it.
Good to Have:
You have configured Jira from scratch for a team of 10 or more workflows, board types, automation rules, permissions, and integrations with Slack or GitHub.
You have introduced an agile delivery process in a team that did not previously have one, and it stuck.
You produce a sprint health report without being asked, and leadership uses it to make decisions.
Engineers on your previous teams would say delivery improved noticeably after you joined, not just that things were more organised.
Tools:
Jira primary tool; you are expected to become the team's resident expert and administrator.
Confluence or Notion sprint wikis, onboarding docs, process documentation.
Slack daily async communication, blocker escalation, release coordination.
Google Workspace planning documents, status decks, retrospective templates.
GitHub: enough familiarity to understand PR status, branch health, and what 'blocked on review' actually means for delivery.

Experience
2-5 yrs