IT Project Manager

Title: IT Project Manager
Location: Orange County, CA
Duration: Long term

Job Description:
• Lead end-to-end IT project delivery, including initiation, planning, execution, monitoring, and closure.
• Develop and maintain project plans, schedules, budgets, milestones, RAID logs, and project documentation.
• Manage project scope, requirements, timelines, dependencies, risks, issues, and change requests.
• Coordinate cross-functional teams including IT, business stakeholders, vendors, developers, infrastructure teams, and third-party partners.
• Facilitate project meetings, status reviews, steering committee meetings, and stakeholder communications.
• Track project progress and provide regular status reports to leadership and stakeholders.
• Identify project risks and develop mitigation and contingency strategies.
• Manage vendor relationships, deliverables, contracts, and performance against project objectives.
• Ensure projects follow organizational governance, PMO standards, methodologies, and quality processes.
• Coordinate testing, deployment, implementation, and transition-to-support activities.
• Ensure effective communication between technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Monitor project financials, resource allocation, and overall project performance.
• Drive issue resolution and escalate critical risks or decisions when necessary.
• Ensure project deliverables meet business requirements, technical standards, and compliance expectations.
• Support continuous improvement of project management processes and best practices.
Required Skills:
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Business Administration, Engineering, or a related field.
• 5+ years of experience in IT project management, preferably managing medium to large-scale technology initiatives.
• Strong knowledge of project management methodologies, including Agile, Waterfall, or hybrid approaches.
• Demonstrated experience managing project scope, schedule, budget, resources, risks, and dependencies.
• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills.
• Experience working with cross-functional and geographically distributed teams.
• Proficiency with project management and collaboration tools such as Microsoft Project, Jira, Azure DevOps, Smartsheet, or equivalent.
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, organizational, and leadership skills.
Preferred Qualifications:
• PMP (Project Management Professional) Certification - Preferred/Strongly Preferred.
• Tolling industry experience - Preferred.
• Experience with Electronic Toll Collection (ETC), All-Electronic Tolling (AET), Open Road Tolling (ORT), or Cashless Tolling projects.
• Experience with transportation technology, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), roadway systems, or transportation infrastructure projects.
• Familiarity with tolling technologies such as RFID/transponders, Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR/ANPR), toll transaction processing, vehicle classification, roadside systems, and back-office systems.
• Experience integrating tolling systems with payment processing, customer service, violation/enforcement, or transportation management systems.
• Experience working with government agencies, transportation authorities, system integrators, and technology vendors.
• Knowledge of SDLC , system integration, cloud technologies, APIs, cybersecurity, and enterprise IT environments.