Director Project Management

About the company

You would be joining a fast-growing technology business operating in a safety-critical industrial environment in northern Germany. Its development and customer projects are technically demanding, run over long time horizons, and must be managed against a mix of customer expectations, engineering capacity, supply-chain exposure, regulatory requirements, and targets for cost, quality, and delivery.

As the organization further professionalizes its project management function, it is looking for an experienced leader who treats project management as a management responsibility. What matters most is technical credibility, strong leadership, a solid focus on numbers and risk, and confident communication in difficult customer situations.

Responsibilities

• Lead the project management team professionally and disciplinarily across roughly 20 employees located at several sites in Germany.
• Oversee complex development and customer projects with respect to budget, schedule, quality, staffing, risks, and priorities.
• Actively support critical long-duration customer projects with high technical, commercial, and relationship importance.
• Work closely with engineering, product management, program management, operations, and supply chain to assess technical feasibility, available capacity, and realistic project plans.
• Build reliable visibility into project status, resource bottlenecks, risks, dependencies, and escalation needs.
• Prepare solid decision bases for prioritization when objectives conflict and resources are constrained.
• Advance project management standards, risk and escalation processes, and clean handovers toward series production.
• Develop project managers both professionally and personally, while encouraging a clear, solution-focused, and accountable way of working.

Candidate profile

The ideal candidate has a technical or engineering-related degree, preferably in engineering or industrial engineering, along with at least eight years of experience in project or program management for complex technical development or customer projects. Several years of leadership experience, or strong lateral leadership responsibility in demanding project organizations, are also expected.

You should have sufficient technical depth to work confidently with engineering teams and critically evaluate assumptions around effort, feasibility, and dependencies. A proven track record in difficult customer situations—especially delays, risk, escalations, and trust rebuilding—is essential.

In addition, you should be able to review project plans, resource needs, cost assumptions, risks, and priorities in a quantitative way and present them in a format that supports decision-making. You will need to appear confident with customers and internal decision-makers, communicate clearly in critical situations, and maintain a respectful, reliable approach across all hierarchy levels.

Additional information

Location: Hamburg, Germany. Employment type: full-time, onsite.