Project Director

Straive · India

Job Title: Project Director

Location: Mumbai, India (Remote / Hybrid acceptable)

Experience: 15 – 18 Years

Department: Technology & Delivery

Reports To: AVP of Operations

Position Summa ry

We are seeking a highly structured, pragmatic, and results-oriente d Project Direct or to oversee a critical portfolio of External Client Consulting and Product Engineering engagements. This leader will serve as the ultimate authority on program execution, health, and governance across multiple enterprise customer accounts.

The primary mandate of this role is operational excellence: ensuring process efficiency, high-quality engineering outputs, strict schedule adherence, and the optimization of account profit margins. This is a delivery-focused execution role, not a sales position. The ideal candidate possesses impeccable communication skills, deep technical delivery expertise, and the professional confidence to manage client dynamics objectively without being a passive "yes" perso n.

Primary Responsibilities & Core Competencies

1. Program Governance & Financial Tracking (P&L )

• Establish, standardize, and enforce delivery governance across all constituent client projects.
• Track and optimize critical program KPIs including delivery velocity, critical path variance, defect density, and resource utilization.
• Monitor and manage the financial health of assigned accounts, actively tracking burn rates and implementing strategies to maintain or improve target profit marg ins.

2. Delivery Mechanics & Framework Manage ment

• Oversee projects executing under both Agile/Scrum and Hybrid delivery frameworks, ensuring teams maintain a predictable sprint cadence and release schedule.
• Review project plans and sprint backlogs to identify critical gaps in scope, resource allocation, and timeline.
• Actively resolve inter-project dependencies and delivery risks before they impact the integrated master sched ule.

3. Escalation Management & Root Cause Analysis ( RCA)

• Serve as the primary operational point of escalation for client accounts.
• Rapidly execute rigorous Root Cause Analyses (RCAs) for any delivery slippage, quality drops, or customer escalations, and immediately deploy structured, sustainable remediation pl ans.

4. Cross-Functional Operations & Capacity Manage ment

• Resource & Capacity Management: Partner closely with Recruitment to forecast capacity demands, address technical talent gaps, and streamline bench management.
• Operational Alignment: Collaborate with Presales during the tail-end of the sales cycle to ensure seamless transition gates, scope clarity, and accurate estimation handovers into active delivery.
• Financial Administration: Partner with the Finance team to guarantee operational hygiene. Ensure customer invoicing is accurate, verified against milestones/timesheets, and dispatched on time. Oversee the timely generation and tracking of vendor work orders (WOs).
• Compliance & Infrastructure: Coordinate with Internal IT and InfoSec to ensure all client-facing engineering environments comply with data security architectures and strict client compliance manda tes.

5. Client Management & Professional Ca ndor

• Function as a trusted, confident advisory link between the client’s leadership and internal engineering teams.
• Manage scope creep aggressively via formal change control; confidently negotiate delivery realities and push back constructively against unrealistic timelines or un-baselined requireme nts.

Candidate Profile & Qualifications

• Experi ence: 15 to 18 years of progressive experience in IT delivery, with a proven track record of managing multi-project portfolios for external cli ents.
• Technical Domain Exper tise: Proven experience directing complex external software engineering, product development, or technical consulting engagem ents.
• Methodo logy: Deep operational knowledge of Agile/Scrum and Hybrid delivery methodologies, including metrics tracking (burndown charts, velocity, cycle t ime).
• Financial Ac umen: Strong understanding of project financials, gross margins, resource costing, and tracking profit met rics.
• Communica tion: Impeccable verbal and written communication skills, capable of providing direct, action-oriented updates to both internal C-suite executives and external client stake holders.