Senior Project Manager, Scrum Master

At Emerald, we strive to foster a diverse and inclusive community. We actively recruit and champion candidates who bring new perspectives from varied professional backgrounds and experiences, and we are intentional about ensuring a positive hiring experience for everyone. Our job postings don’t contain experience inflation, and most don’t require college degrees. Instead, they’re crafted to focus on outcomes and transferable experiences that are assessed in a structured interview process carried out by trained hiring teams. 

•Lead end-to-end delivery of data platform, integration, analytics, and reporting initiatives from intake and discovery through production deployment and transition to support.

•Serve as Scrum Master and Agile delivery lead for the data platform team, promoting effective Agile practices and helping the team continuously improve delivery velocity, quality, and predictability.

•Facilitate backlog grooming, sprint planning, daily standups, technical design reviews, sprint reviews or demonstrations, retrospectives, and release-readiness activities.

•Partner with product owners and business stakeholders to define priorities, clarify requirements, establish acceptance criteria, sequence dependencies, and maintain a healthy, actionable backlog.

•Work with data engineers and technical leads to size user stories, plan sprint capacity, monitor progress, identify blockers, and keep commitments aligned with available resources.

•Build and maintain integrated project plans, roadmaps, milestones, RAID logs, RACI charts, stakeholder registers, decision logs, status reports, test plans, deployment checklists, and lessons learned.

•Coordinate cross-functional work across data engineering, application teams, enterprise architecture, security, infrastructure, business intelligence, data governance, vendors, and business functions.

•Manage delivery of cloud data-platform capabilities, including source ingestion, API and file-based integrations, data transformation, master data, data quality, governance, data models, and Power BI reporting.

•Coordinate structured QA and user acceptance testing, including test planning, business tester readiness, defect triage, evidence collection, sign-off, and readiness for production deployment.

•Ensure releases follow Forge change-management and deployment-governance requirements, with appropriate approvals, documentation, QA/UAT evidence, communications, and support transition.

•Identify delivery risks, resource constraints, scope changes, technical dependencies, and decision points early; drive resolution and escalate when necessary.

•Provide concise, audience-appropriate status reporting to project teams, business stakeholders, technology leadership, and executive sponsors.

•Promote consistent use of Jira and Confluence for user stories, acceptance criteria, sprint tracking, decisions, documentation, and delivery transparency.

•Support continuous improvement of Forge's data-delivery and PMO practices, balancing governance and accountability with practical, outcome-focused execution.

•7+ years of project or program management experience delivering enterprise technology initiatives, including significant experience with data platforms, analytics, business intelligence, integration, or cloud-based systems.

•Demonstrated experience serving as an Agile Scrum Master or Agile Project Manager for data engineering, software development, analytics, or integration teams.

•Strong working knowledge of Scrum practices, including backlog management, user stories, acceptance criteria, estimation, sprint planning, standups, reviews, retrospectives, velocity, and impediment removal.

•Experience managing projects involving data ingestion, ETL/ELT pipelines, APIs or web services, relational databases, data warehouses or lakehouses, master data, data quality, and reporting.

•Experience coordinating QA, UAT, change control, deployment readiness, production releases, and transition to operational support.

•Advanced project planning, organization, risk management, dependency management, vendor management, and stakeholder communication skills.

•Ability to translate between business outcomes and technical delivery details and to communicate

technical information clearly to senior management.

•Experience collaborating with distributed teams, offshore development partners, consultants, and third-party vendors.

•Proficiency with Jira and Confluence; experience with complementary planning and reporting tools is valuable.

•Ability to operate effectively in a fast-moving environment with multiple concurrent initiatives and evolving priorities.

•Experience delivering initiatives on Databricks, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, or comparable modern data and analytics platforms.

•Experience with medallion or layered data architectures, data lakehouse patterns, semantic models, customer or audience data, master data management, and enterprise data governance.

•Experience leading data-platform work in a public company, private-equity portfolio company, media, events, or another highly regulated and dynamic environment.

•Project Management Professional (PMP), Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), Professional Scrum Master (PSM), PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP), SAFe Scrum Master, or equivalent certification.

•Experience supporting M&A data integration, platform consolidation, or enterprise-wide transformation programs.

The strongest candidate combines disciplined project management with practical Scrum leadership. They can create order from ambiguity, keep a technical team focused without adding unnecessary process, and build trust across business and technology stakeholders. They are comfortable discussing data pipelines, integrations, testing, and release dependencies, while remaining focused on business value, delivery outcomes, team health, and clear accountability.