Senior Technical Project Manager / Delivery Lead

We are working on a large, high-priority software project under significant time pressure, with a team of >10 developers working in parallel. We are looking for an experienced, hands-on Technical Project Manager / Delivery Lead who takes full ownership of execution: tracking daily progress across the team, staying in sync with the business side on shifting customer demands, identifying where things are stuck, continuously re-setting priorities, and making sure the timeline holds even under demanding scope and a tight schedule.

This is not a role for someone who manages from a dashboard. We need someone who talks to developers every day, understands technical blockers well enough to challenge estimates, removes obstacles before they cost a day, and keeps constant pressure toward the deadline without letting quality slip. You are also the bridge to the business team: you know what customers are asking for right now, translate that into tickets and priorities, and keep both sides aligned on what's realistic. You are the person who knows at any given moment exactly where the project stands, who is behind, why, and what needs to happen today to fix it.

Our product is a complex SaaS solution in the ERP space, where many individual modules work together to form a complete solution for businesses. Accordingly, technical understanding that goes beyond pure project management is essential: you should be able to realistically estimate ticket effort yourself - particularly in PHP and Angular - so you can meaningfully challenge developers on time estimates and architecture decisions in conversation, rather than simply accepting them.
The ideal candidate has led development teams of comparable size before, understands the specifics of large, modular SaaS/ERP systems, can push people while keeping them motivated, is comfortable working closely with business stakeholders to keep tickets in sync with evolving customer needs, and treats an ambitious deadline as a problem to be solved rather than a reason to lower expectations.

Main responsibilities:
- Own the ongoing delivery of a project with highly specialized industry-specific processes
- Track progress against the timeline continuously, not just at sprint boundaries
- Stay in close exchange with the business team to understand where things stand and translate changing customer demands into synced, prioritized tickets
- Identify bottlenecks, blockers, and slipping tasks early, and resolve them directly
- Provide well-founded estimates of ticket effort (PHP/backend, Angular/frontend) to review and realistically challenge developer estimates
- Understand the architecture and dependencies between ERP modules to set priorities on solid technical grounds
- Continuously set and re-prioritize the backlog based on what actually moves the deadline and what the business/customers need
- Run daily check-ins / stand-ups and hold developers accountable to their commitments
- Resolve dependencies between backend and frontend work
- Communicate clear, realistic status upward, including bad news early
- Keep the team motivated and focused under sustained time pressure
- Push back on scope or technical decisions that put the timeline at risk
- Align with stakeholders on trade-offs between scope, quality, and deadline
 

Required skills:
- Proven experience leading software delivery
- Experience with large, complex SaaS projects, ideally in the ERP space with multiple interacting modules
- Solid technical understanding of PHP backend and Angular frontend architecture, sufficient to judge effort estimates yourself
- Comfortable operating as the link between developers and business/customer-facing stakeholders, translating changing requirements into actionable tickets
- Experience with projects under hard deadlines and significant pressure
- Excellent prioritization skills and confidence in fast trade-off decisions
- Strong communication skills, able to give direct feedback and hold people accountable
- High ownership mentality - treats project success as personal responsibility
- Experience with agile/sprint-based workflows and project tracking tools (we use Jetbrain's YouTrack)
- Ability to work independently as a freelancer, self-organized, no hand-holding required

Nice to have:
- Own development experience in PHP and/or Angular before moving into a lead role
- Experience leading distributed/remote teams
- Experience with startups or projects under investor/client delivery pressure
- Experience working with international teams (Ukraine/Germany development teams)