Senior Project Manager - Software Development

Overview

For more than 25 years we have taken on some of the hardest digital challenges governments and enterprises face. Great software delivery is not project plans and status reports. It is the people you build, the trust you earn with a customer, and the discipline to keep improving how the work gets done. Today that means delivering with AI at the center of how we work, not at the edge of it.

Who You Are

You work with people as much as you work on projects. You stay steady under pressure, communicate with confidence, and earn trust without performing it. You coach, you delegate, and you build teams that hold together.
You are self‑driven and always learning. When you don't know something, you find out. When something breaks, you and your team fix it. You don't wait to be taught what you need to succeed.

What You'll Do

Lead complex software projects from first scope to delivery, working with the customer and a multidisciplinary team the whole way. In practice that means:

• Lead distributed international development and testing teams, motivating them across time zones and borders.
• Build trusted relationships with customers and act as their delivery partner, negotiating scope and change requests on equal footing and protecting our commercial interests when the situation becomes tense.
• Plan and steer with both classical and agile methods, knowing when each fits.
• Own budget, schedule, risk, dependencies, and project profitability. Prioritize, delegate, and seek help when the load becomes too high.
• Understand engineering well enough to hold a technical conversation and to know how a business application gets built from scratch, even though you do not need to write code.

What We're Looking For

We expect you to run recurring project work AI‑first and make the method reusable, so the capability benefits not just you but your entire team. You should be able to:

• Run status reports, delivery roadmaps, and KPI analysis AI‑first, generated from your project data rather than assembled by hand.
• Delegate defined steps to AI agents and verify their output at critical points.
• Understand the AI‑first SDLC: how to initiate and run a project AI‑first, how to move a team from traditional to AI‑first delivery, and how the roles around you shift during that transition.
• Handle customer‑side AI constraints with judgment—including public versus sensitive data, on‑premise versus cloud, and situations where a customer prohibits AI—and explain calmly how our licensed tools align with their policies and legal requirements.
• Have extensive experience leading software development projects and distributed international teams.
• Be comfortable working directly with customers, building enduring relationships.
• Make data‑driven decisions; at Nortal numbers are a daily habit, not a quarterly event.
• Communicate precisely, reliably, and professionally in written form.
• Negotiate and communicate confidently in German (C1) and work in English daily; be prepared to travel occasionally for customer meetings and team gatherings.

Nice to Have

• Hands‑on experience with AI‑first frameworks in real project work.
• Experience delivering fixed‑price projects and understanding their impact on P&L.
• Experience in the public sector and managing risk in a crisis.
• Experience responding to public tenders or proposals.
• Higher PM certification such as PMP or an AI‑first/AI‑in‑PM qualification.