Sr IT Project Manager

Senior IT Project Manager

Join a winning team of innovative thinkers, seasoned mortgage professionals, and financial experts. Build your career at Planet—recognized as a Top Mortgage Employer by National Mortgage Professional.

The Sr IT Project Manager is responsible for the successful initiation, planning, execution, control, deployment and closure of technology projects within the enterprise data program, including the buildout of our Snowflake data platform, data governance and data quality initiatives, and the data foundation supporting enterprise AI use cases. The Senior IT Project Manager delivers projects on time and on budget and provides clear communication and transparency to the Sponsor and other stakeholders on status, risks and issues, and resource and capacity conflicts. The role also ensures project artifacts and meetings are managed in accordance with enterprise standards.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

• Uses proven Project Management tools and methodologies to define, plan, execute and control technology-driven projects within defined guidelines from initiation through completion.
• Functions as the central point of contact for project-related activities. Facilitates project meetings, holds project participants accountable, maintains project schedules, milestones and documentation, and ensures adherence to standard processes, timelines, budgets and deliverables.
• Support the Technical Platform Director in the development and maintenance of a multi-year enterprise data roadmap, working across origination, servicing, capital markets, finance and risk to capture demand, understand business priorities and sequence work into a coherent, publishable plan. Maintains the roadmap as a living artifact and manages it in partnership with the technical program director.
• Establishes and operates a transparent intake and prioritization process for data demand, facilitating tradeoff decisions among business stakeholders with competing priorities and making capacity constraints visible before they create risk.
• Manages changes to project scope, requirements and other project components using appropriate, defined communication channels.
• Coordinates delivery across data engineering, data architecture, business intelligence and vendor/implementation partners, sequencing data ingestion, migration and platform buildout work on the Snowflake platform.
• Partners with data owners, data stewards and business stakeholders to build data governance, data quality, security and compliance requirements into project scope, acceptance criteria and deliverables. This role helps facilitate data governance and steering forums and prepares supporting materials.
• Forms collaborative partnerships across all staff levels, including origination, servicing, capital markets, finance, compliance, technology and other departments. Works through conflicting perspectives to arrive at creative and effective solutions. Influences completion of project activities through dotted line relationships.
• Manages day-to-day project activities and makes sound decisions based on project management experience and knowledge of the business/company/industry.
• Performs other duties as assigned.

Position Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in related field or equivalent work experience
• Minimum of eight years of technology experience, preferably in financial services or residential mortgage, with at least five years leading data-centric programs or projects (e.g., data warehouse or cloud data platform implementations, data migrations, data governance or analytics initiatives). Hands-on experience delivering programs on the Snowflake platform strongly preferred.
• Minimum of six years of Project Management experience.
• PMP certification preferred.
• Agile (e.g., CSM, PMI-ACP) or Snowflake (e.g., SnowPro Core) certification a plus.
• Must have experience and demonstrable ability to plan and manage multiple, complex projects at the same time.

Functional/Technical Skills

• Deep mastery of project management techniques, including scope management, schedule development and control, stakeholder management, risk management, vendor and contract management, and budget and cost control.
• Practical experience managing within multiple SDLCs, including Agile, Waterfall and hybrid models
• Practical knowledge of several project and portfolio management tools and platforms, such as MS Project, Monday.com, Smartsheet and Jira.
• Working knowledge of modern data platform concepts and tools, including cloud data warehousing (Snowflake), data ingestion/ELT, data modeling, data catalog and governance tools, and BI/reporting, sufficient to lead technical teams and challenge estimates; hands-on engineering skills are not required.
• Understanding of how data foundations enable analytics and AI/ML use cases, including data readiness, quality, access controls and responsible data use.
• Familiarity with mortgage origination and servicing data (e.g., LOS, servicing system and investor/GSE reporting data) preferred.
• Translates technical complexity into plain business language. Able to explain platform work, dependencies and tradeoffs to senior business executives without jargon, and to brief executive audiences on status, risk and decisions needed in terms of business impact rather than technical activity.
• Prepares and delivers executive-level materials and updates that lead with the decision or the ask, are concise, and hold up to questioning from senior leaders.
• Effective escalation skills, inclusive of knowing when to escalate, to whom and with what essential information.
• Demonstrated ability to work collaboratively and effectively in a fast-paced environment with minimal oversight and direction.
• Ability to lead without defined authority, manage through ambiguity and resolve conflicts.
• Experience handling geographically distributed, culturally diverse work groups with strong team management, leadership and coaching skills.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with business and technical aptitude supported by a demonstrated systems thinking mindset.

Environmental/Physical Demands

Work is typically performed in a standard office environment. Some travel may be required (up to 10%). The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. While performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly required to sustain predictable work attendance, communicate with others, frequently required to stand, walk, sit, and use arms, hands and fingers to reach, handle or touch. The employee must occasionally lift and/or move up to 10 pounds. Specific vision abilities required by this job include close vision, and ability to adjust focus. Pursuant to the Americans with Disabilities Act, reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

This job description is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of all activities, duties or responsibilities that are required of an employee. The Company reserves the right to amend or modify this document at any time and without notice.

Our benefits package includes 3 comprehensive Cigna or Kaiser medical plans, dental, and vision insurance. We provide short term and long-term disability insurance, basic life insurance, 401(k), and 11 employer paid holidays. In addition, we offer supplemental benefits to include life insurance, critical illness and accident plans.