About the roleThis role sits next to our Product Manager and inside the Engineering team. You'll own the operational side of how we plan, ship, and report on work: the cycle cadence, ticket hygiene, release coordination, and cross-functional program management across product, engineering, ML, and CS.
This is a hands-on, proactive operating role. You're the person a fast-moving engineering team routes through. You keep the work moving without waiting to be asked, and you make the way the team works a little better every cycle.
What you'll doCycle operations- Run the team's three-week cycle cadence, including kickoff, daily standups, scope check-ins, demos, and retrospectives
- Keep blockers moving by getting each one to the person who can clear it, the same day
- Own the delivery record, the single tracker that shows the team, leadership, and CS where every piece of work stands
- Log lost time against each commitment the day it happens, and flag early when scope needs a cut
Ticket hygiene- Maintain high-quality tickets with clear acceptance criteria and correct prioritization
- Ensure work is properly structured (parents, dependencies, scope)
- Identify and clean up orphaned, duplicate, or stale tickets
- Push back on stories that are not ready for development
Cross-functional program management- Coordinate initiatives that span multiple teams, including Product, Engineering, ML, and Customer Success
- Manage dependencies across areas such as integrations, data pipelines, and customer readiness
- Act as the connective tissue to keep projects moving forward
- Route incoming requests to the right place (on-call, a small-fixes queue, or a future cycle) so work doesn't get assigned through DMs
Release coordination- Track what is included in each release
- Draft release notes and communicate updates clearly to stakeholders
- Partner with Customer Success to prepare for customer-facing changes
- Keep teams informed without creating unnecessary noise
Process improvement- Identify gaps and inefficiencies in current workflows
- Propose and implement practical improvements
- Continuously evolve team processes rather than simply maintaining them
- Run the team's written playbook from day one, and take ownership of it once you've run a full cycle
What we're looking forExperience4+ years as a project manager, technical program manager, or scrum master in a software organization.
Working style- Comfortable in an engineering room. You can follow a technical debate without needing translation.
- Not afraid to push back when a senior dev says "just trust me."
- You care about the craft of project management more than the title.
- You have opinions about how teams should work, but aren't dogmatic. Methodology is a tool, not a rulebook.
- You'd rather build a useful spreadsheet than implement a heavy framework.
- Comfortable being the only PM in a room of engineers.
- You're the hub. The team routes through you, so you're reachable and responsive during core hours, and you protect focus time without becoming hard to find.
- You finish what you pick up, completely and correctly, without needing someone to check on it.
Mindset- Strong written communication. A lot of our work happens asynchronously and in writing.
- Comfort with ambiguity. We have a written process, and it changes every time we learn something. You'll run it and make it better.
- You care about where the work lands. The dollars our product helps move go to university scholarships, hospital research, and food banks, and that should matter to you.
- Curious about AI as a product surface, not just a hype cycle.
- Excited by building infrastructure from scratch instead of inheriting something polished.
Nice to have- Experience in nonprofit tech, fundraising, or B2B SaaS for nonprofits
- Familiarity with AI or ML product workflows
- Background coordinating CRM integrations (eg. Salesforce, Raiser's Edge, etc)
What this isn'tA pure scrum master role. We don't need someone to facilitate ceremonies and disappear. We need a partner who owns the delivery side end to end and is comfortable being accountable for whether the work ships.
