Operations Project Manager

Role: Operations Project Manager

Location: Houston, TX

Employment Type: FTE - Permanent

Note:

• Exposure to advanced manufacturing, data centers, large-scale customer deployments, construction, or EPC-style project delivery
• Ieally in energy, hardware, manufacturing, or another capital-intensive environment

Key Responsibilities

• Own the integrated master schedule across all active projects in one place, with the cross-project dependency map and the critical path through them
• Drive the schedule: set and defend milestone dates, push owners to commit, and escalate early when a date is at risk rather than reporting the miss afterward
• Force trade-offs in advance when projects compete for the same resources, parts or weeks, and build the capacity plan that shows where we are over-committed before we commit further
• Keep small slips from compounding: when one date moves, know the same day what else moves with it and who needs to hear about it
• Establish and run the operating cadence (planning, weekly execution reviews and monthly portfolio reviews) and support the reporting that goes to leadership and the Board
• Run risk, issue and change management, track decisions to closure, and chase down blockers so things move between the meetings
• Define the minimum standards every project follows (scope, schedule, milestones, risks, actions, issues, decisions and status), light enough that teams use them without being told twice
• Lead the stand-up of our project management platform: evaluate the options, make a recommendation, implement it, and own the migration from spreadsheets and status decks to a single source of truth, in-line with best-in-class tools
• Own the configuration, administration and data quality of the platform, and keep improving it as the portfolio grows from 20 projects to 60+
• Build the reporting and dashboards so status is generated rather than assembled by hand, and anyone can see where a project stands without having to ask
• Run one portfolio across Switzerland and the United States, with the same schedule, definitions and view of status on both sides, working across time zones without losing days to them
• Manage the handoffs between Swiss engineering and US manufacturing and operations, where most of our dependencies and most of our risk live
• Partner with project and functional owners across engineering, manufacturing, supply chain, customer deployment and finance so the process serves them rather than taxes them
• Give the CEO, CTO and COO a clear portfolio view of what is on track, what is at risk and what needs a decision, and shape how the function scales, including the first hire on your team

Skills and Experience Required

• Roughly 4 to 7 years of experience in project, program or PMO roles, with meaningful time at an early-stage or high-growth company, ideally in energy, hardware, manufacturing or another capital-intensive environment
• A track record of driving schedules (e.g. comfortable telling a senior engineer that their date does not work with the credibility and the data to drive progress)
• Direct experience bringing structure to an organization that did not have it: standing up a PMO, a portfolio process or a project management platform, including what you built, what you deliberately left out and how you got people to adopt it
• Hands-on depth in a modern project management platform (for example Jira, Smartsheet, Asana, Monday or Planview), including configuration and administration, not only use
• Comfort managing dependencies across many concurrent projects, and the judgment to know which need escalation
• Experience working across sites, countries and time zones, with the discipline that makes distributed work move rather than stall
• An engineering or technical background
• Strong influence without authority: the process only works if project owners choose to use it
• A bias to action and a pragmatic view of process: enough structure to make the chaos legible, not so much that it slows the company down
• Excellent written and verbal communication in English, and the ability to work independently in a lean, global team
• Willing to be based onsite in Houston and to travel regularly, including to Switzerland
• Must have existing authorization to work in the United States

Desirable

• Experience taking a manufacturing organization through the transition from prototype to volume production
• Experience incorporating AI into project management to enable organization-level speed
• Exposure to advanced manufacturing, data centers, large-scale customer deployments, construction or EPC-style project delivery
• PMP certification (Project Management Professional, PMI)
• Working proficiency in French