Principal Project Manager

Job description

As the global leader in AI-powered customer experience assurance, we help some of the world's most recognized brands deliver seamless, reliable, and engaging interactions across voice, digital, messaging, and AI-powered channels. Every year, our platform helps optimize hundreds of millions of customer journeys, ensuring businesses can confidently deliver exceptional experiences at scale. As enterprises race to deploy agentic AI, the defining question is no longer whether AI can handle customer interactions, it’s whether those interactions can be trusted. Cyara is the confidence layer that answers that question, testing AI agents with AI agents to detect hallucinations, validate decisions, and ensure compliance before failures ever reach your customers. Joining Cyara means helping shape the future of customer experience, partnering with some of the world’s biggest brands, and working alongside passionate, talented people who are committed to making every customer interaction better. As the global leader in AI-powered customer experience assurance, we help some of the world's most recognized brands deliver seamless, reliable, and engaging interactions across voice, digital, messaging, and AI-powered channels. Every year, our platform helps optimize hundreds of millions of customer journeys, ensuring businesses can confidently deliver exceptional experiences at scale. As enterprises race to deploy agentic AI, the defining question is no longer whether AI can handle customer interactions, it’s whether those interactions can be trusted. Cyara is the confidence layer that answers that question, testing AI agents with AI agents to detect hallucinations, validate decisions, and ensure compliance before failures ever reach your customers. Joining Cyara means helping shape the future of customer experience, partnering with some of the world’s biggest brands, and working alongside passionate, talented people who are committed to making every customer interaction better. ### About the Role The Principal Project Manager is a senior delivery leader within Professional Services, responsible for the rigor, predictability, and outcomes of Cyara’s implementation and services portfolio. Reporting to the Senior Director, Professional Services, this is a player-coach role: you will personally own a portfolio of complex, strategic customer engagements while leading and developing a small team of Project Managers supporting customers across North America, EMEA, and APAC. You will set the standard for how Professional Services plans, governs, reports on, and closes out customer projects — bringing PMO discipline to a global delivery organization. ### What You’ll Do **Portfolio Leadership & Delivery Execution** - Own a portfolio of complex, multi-phase, and strategic customer implementations and services engagements from initiation through formal completion and closure. - Lead and coach a small team of Project Managers, setting expectations, reviewing project plans, and holding the team accountable to consistent delivery standards. - Personally manage select high-value or high-complexity accounts, staying close to delivery while building the team’s ability to do the same. **Project Governance & PMO Standards** - Establish consistent project-management standards, templates, and methodologies across Professional Services, covering planning, resource forecasting, effort estimation, and change control. - Define governance for complex, multi-phase, recurring, and long-duration programs, including clear criteria for closing individual phases and full projects instead of leaving them administratively open. - Build the risk management, dependency tracking, and executive escalation practices that keep engagements on track and stakeholders informed. **Cross-Functional Partnership & Executive Communication** - Partner with Professional Services leadership, consultants, technical resources, Sales, and Customer Success to align delivery plans with customer commitments and business priorities. - Serve as the executive point of contact for project status, risk, and escalation on strategic accounts, communicating directly with customer sponsors and internal leadership. - Build feedback checkpoints at meaningful delivery milestones so customer satisfaction is measured throughout an engagement, not only at its conclusion. **Reporting, Financial Performance & Continuous Improvement** - Own project health, milestone, budget, hours, and utilization reporting, using Rocketlane or a comparable PSA platform to give leadership real-time visibility into the portfolio. - Track forecast accuracy, time-to-value, and financial performance across the portfolio, and correct course when projects drift from plan. - Identify systemic delivery risks from portfolio data, recommend process changes, and build the playbooks, templates, and dashboards that let the PMO function scale. ### What You’ll Bring **Delivery Leadership & Project Management Experience** - Significant experience managing complex enterprise technology implementations or Professional Services engagements, including multiple concurrent projects or portfolios. - Experience leading and developing Project Managers, with the ability and willingness to personally manage projects while also providing team leadership. - Strong executive customer communication and escalation-management skills, gained working directly with customer sponsors and internal leadership on complex engagements. **PMO & Project Management Discipline** - Demonstrated ability to build or mature PMO processes: templates, governance standards, reporting, and delivery methodology. - Strong understanding of PMI-aligned project-management disciplines, including planning, risk, scope, and change management. - Experience managing project financials — budgets, hours, forecasts, and change requests — and resource plans across a portfolio of engagements. - Experience working across global, cross-functional organizations spanning multiple regions and time zones. **Academic Qualifications, Certifications & Preferred Experience** - Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in business, information technology, or a related field. - PMP certification strongly preferred. - Experience with Rocketlane, Salesforce, or comparable PSA platforms preferred. - SaaS, enterprise software, CX, CCaaS, telecommunications, testing/automation, or related technology experience preferred. ### Why This Role - You’ll bring PMO rigor to a global Professional Services organization, shaping how Cyara plans, governs, and closes customer engagements across North America, EMEA, and APAC. - You’ll operate as both a player and a coach — owning strategic accounts directly while building the standards and capability of a growing Project Management team. - You’ll report to the Senior Director, Professional Services, and partner closely with Professional Services leadership, Sales, and Customer Success to improve time-to-value, financial performance, and customer satisfaction across the portfolio.