About the job:
We're looking for a Technical Project Manager with strong Scrum facilitation skills to lead delivery of ETL, data transformation, and AI/ML initiatives built on Databricks and modern data platforms. Facilitates Scrum ceremonies, protects the team from unplanned work, and coordinates cross-functional dependencies — while managing delivery roadmap, stakeholder communication, and risk reporting. Scope and budget trade-off decisions are escalated to Product Owner/Engineering leadership, not resolved unilaterally.
Responsibilities:
Delivery & Program Ownership
- Lead technical feasibility and project estimation with full accountability
- Engage with architecture and engineering leaders to maintain roadmaps
- Oversee full development lifecycle for ETL/transformation and AI/ML solutions
- Define quarterly objectives and assignments for product/data teams
- Plan for risks, anticipate bottlenecks, and own escalation management
- Develop capacity models and estimation frameworks for discovery-heavy ETL/ML work
- Communicate progress, risk, and delivery status to stakeholders and leadership
Agile Facilitation
- Facilitate Scrum ceremonies: daily stand-ups, sprint planning, backlog refinement, sprint reviews, retrospectives
- Coach teams on agile principles, self-organization, and continuous improvement
- Identify, track, and remove impediments affecting sprint goals and delivery flow
- Protect the team from scope churn and unplanned work while maintaining stakeholder alignment
- Monitor velocity, burndown, and delivery metrics to improve predictability
Technical Coordination
- Work with data engineers, data architects, data modellers, data analysts, ETL developers, DBAs, BI teams, and cloud teams to resolve cross-team dependencies
- Help break down and estimate ETL/transformation stories: extraction, transformation logic, pipeline optimization, data quality
- Ensure alignment between ingestion schedules, upstream/downstream systems, and sprint commitments
- Coordinate AI/ML workstream dependencies (model dev, training, deployment, monitoring) distinct from standard ETL sprints
Qualifications:
- Bachelor's degree in engineering, computer science, or related field
- 10–12+ years IT experience, including 4–6 years as Project/Program Manager and 3+ years in Scrum Master/Agile Delivery capacity
Required Skills:
- Hands-on experience with Databricks, Snowflake, or Informatica; familiarity with Azure Data Factory
- Strong SQL and data modeling understanding
- Experience with Jira/Azure DevOps, Confluence
- Scrum certification (CSM, PSM, SAFe Scrum Master) preferred
- Ability to translate technical complexity for non-technical stakeholders
- Proven escalation management and risk mitigation in regulated or high-data-quality environments
Preferred Skills:
- Domain experience in insurance, banking, or healthcare
- Tableau or other BI reporting tool exposure
- MLOps familiarity (MLflow, CI/CD for ML pipelines)
- SAFe scaled-agile experience across multiple squads
- Databricks hands-on experience (notebooks, jobs, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog) - doesn't need to write production code, but needs to read pipeline logic and DAGs
