Senior Technical Project Manager

Our client, a large player in consumer retail, is seeking a Senior Technical Project Manager to drive delivery and execution using Scrum and technical/data product initiatives

Join a high impact, fast moving team supporting a high-visibility initiative tied to merchant pricing, forecasting, and internal data products within a large enterprise, retail environment. Reporting into the PMO, the Project Manager owns delivery execution within a pod structure alongside a Technical Lead and Product Owners, with a clear focus on execution rather than product strategy.

Start: ASAP

Location: Hybrid, 3 days per week - Brampton or North York

Duration: To December to align with fiscal, will be extended if candidate is a good fit. The project has a multi-year roadmap.

Promo Price Optimization Team

This role is for an experienced Technical Project Manager who will lead the agile planning, execution, coordination, and delivery management of the Analytics Pod. The TPM will work closely with the Product Owner, Technical Lead, analytics team, engineering partners, and other cross-functional stakeholders to translate product priorities and technical initiatives into well-planned, executable sprint commitments.

The Technical Project Manager will own the operating rhythm required to deliver effectively: sprint planning, backlog readiness, dependency management, risk and issue management, delivery tracking, stakeholder reporting, and continuous improvement. This individual will bring structure and transparency to complex analytics and technology initiatives while enabling the Product Owner and Technical Lead to focus on product direction and technical execution.

The successful candidate will be comfortable operating in an environment where work spans data, analytics, machine learning, software engineering, and product development, and where requirements and technical approaches may evolve through experimentation and iterative delivery.

Core Responsibilities & Experience

• Drive the day-to-day agile delivery and execution of the Analytics Pod, ensuring priorities translate into clear, achievable sprint plans and delivery commitments.
• Maintain appropriate project and delivery artifacts in Jira and Confluence, ensuring the backlog, roadmap, decisions, risks, and delivery status remain current and accessible.
• Partner closely with the Product Owner and Technical Lead to plan upcoming work, sequence initiatives, assess readiness, identify dependencies, and maintain alignment between product priorities and technical capacity.
• Facilitate and continuously improve core Agile/Scrum ceremonies, including sprint planning, daily stand-ups, backlog refinement, sprint reviews, retrospectives, and release planning.
• Maintain visibility into sprint and roadmap execution by tracking commitments, progress, blockers, dependencies, risks, scope changes, and delivery outcomes.
• Drive backlog readiness in partnership with the Product Owner and Technical Lead, ensuring work entering a sprint has sufficient requirements, acceptance criteria, technical understanding, dependencies, and sizing to support effective execution.
• Coordinate work across analytics, data engineering, software engineering, product, platform, and other dependent teams where delivery requires multiple technical capabilities.
• Proactively identify and manage delivery risks, technical dependencies, resource constraints, sequencing conflicts, and cross-team blockers, driving issues to resolution and escalating when appropriate.
• Provide clear, concise, and reliable delivery reporting to product, technology, and leadership stakeholders, including sprint progress, roadmap status, risks, dependencies, decisions, and changes to expected delivery.
• Use delivery metrics and team feedback to identify opportunities to improve predictability, throughput, backlog quality, estimation, planning, and team effectiveness.
• Support release and deployment coordination where Analytics Pod deliverables require integration with application capabilities, data pipelines, production environments, or dependent services.
• Facilitate effective decision-making by ensuring unresolved product, technical, data, or delivery questions have clear owners and are resolved within the timeframe required to protect delivery.
• Foster a collaborative, accountable team environment while protecting the team from unnecessary process overhead and ensuring Agile practices support delivery rather than becoming administrative exercises.
• Requires significant experience (e.g., 5+ years) managing complex technology, software, data, or analytics delivery within Agile environments, with demonstrated experience leading multiple workstreams and coordinating cross-functional teams.

Technical & Delivery Skills

• Agile Delivery: Strong practical experience leading Agile/Scrum delivery teams, including sprint planning, backlog refinement, estimation, retrospectives, dependency management, and iterative delivery.
• Analytics & Data Delivery: Experience managing analytics, data science, machine learning, data engineering, or similarly complex technical initiatives where development includes experimentation, validation, and productionization.
• Software Development Lifecycle: Strong understanding of modern SDLC practices and the lifecycle from requirements and technical design through development, testing, deployment, and production support.
• Backlog & Sprint Management: Strong experience managing product and technical backlogs, sprint capacity, work sequencing, delivery commitments, and changing priorities.
• Risk & Dependency Management: Demonstrated ability to identify and actively manage technical dependencies, delivery risks, blockers, resource constraints, and cross-team coordination.
• Delivery Metrics: Experience using Agile and delivery metrics such as sprint predictability, throughput, cycle time, carryover, velocity, and blocker trends to identify delivery issues and support continuous improvement.
• Tooling: Strong proficiency with Jira and Confluence and experience using delivery dashboards, reporting tools, and documentation practices to provide transparent execution visibility.
• Technical Fluency: Sufficient technical understanding to work effectively with software developers, data engineers, data scientists, architects, and Technical Leads and to understand dependencies, tradeoffs, and delivery implications without needing to be the technical decision-maker.
• Cloud & Modern Engineering Environments: Familiarity with cloud-based software and data environments, preferably GCP, and modern software delivery practices is an asset.
• Professional Skills
• Delivery Leadership: Demonstrated ability to create structure, accountability, and momentum across complex initiatives while enabling teams to remain focused on execution.
• Product & Technical Partnership: Proven ability to operate effectively alongside Product Owners and Technical Leads, maintaining clear accountability between product priorities, technical decisions, and delivery management.
• Planning & Organization: Strong ability to break complex initiatives into executable work, manage competing priorities, coordinate dependencies, and maintain visibility across current and upcoming delivery.
• Communication & Reporting: Ability to communicate delivery status, risks, dependencies, decisions, and tradeoffs clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Problem Solving & Ownership: Proactively identifies delivery problems, drives issues toward resolution, and follows through until blockers or decisions are resolved.
• Stakeholder Management: Ability to work across product, engineering, analytics, business, and leadership stakeholders while managing expectations and maintaining alignment on priorities and delivery commitments.
• Adaptability: Comfortable operating in an evolving product and analytics environment where requirements, priorities, data constraints, and technical approaches may change as teams learn.
• Continuous Improvement: Uses retrospectives, delivery data, and team feedback to improve planning, processes, collaboration, and overall team effectiveness.
• Pragmatic Agile Mindset: Applies Agile principles in a practical manner, adapting process to the needs of the team rather than treating ceremonies or methodology as the objective.

Must Haves:

• 8+ years in Project Management supporting technical data product initiatives
• SQL and database understanding within technical project environments
• Scrum Master experience managing sprint execution
• Technical ticket management including dependency tracking and technical risk coordination
• Excellent communication skills and drive to push initiatives forward

Nice to Have:

• Data product experience
• Project experience supporting products for internal users
• Retail industry experience