Senior Project Manager
DHL · Chennai
Your IT Future, Delivered.
With a global team of 5600+ IT professionals, DHL IT Services connects people and keeps the global economy running by continuously innovating and creating sustainable digital solutions. We work beyond global borders and push boundaries across all dimensions of logistics. You can leave your mark shaping the technology backbone of the biggest logistics company of the world. All our locations have earned the #GreatPlaceToWork certification, reflecting our commitment to exceptional employee experience.
Senior Project Manager
Digitalization. Simply delivered.
At IT Services, we are looking for a Senior Project Manager who combines hands-on software engineering capability with project, product, service, and people leadership. You will lead the delivery, operation, and continuous evolution of enterprise applications and digital products in a global technology environment.
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Grow together
Senior Project Manager – Project Management, Technical Delivery, Product & Service Management
We are seeking a highly experienced Senior Project Manager with a strong software engineering background to lead the delivery, operation, and continuous evolution of enterprise applications and digital products. This is not a traditional project-management-only position. The successful candidate must remain technically hands-on and be capable of contributing to architecture, solution design, code reviews, technical troubleshooting, and critical production decisions.
The role combines Build and Run accountability with project and product management, service management, project governance, stakeholder engagement, and people leadership. The candidate should be comfortable moving between executive-level communication, delivery planning, engineering discussions, operational reviews, reporting, and team development.
End-to-End Project & Delivery Management
- Own delivery of complex technology projects from initiation, discovery, and solution design through build, testing, deployment, hypercare, and transition to operations.
- Define and manage scope, schedule, budget, resource plans, milestones, dependencies, risks, issues, assumptions, and quality expectations.
- Establish fit-for-purpose governance and provide clear, concise status reporting to business and technology leadership.
- Coordinate delivery across product, engineering, architecture, infrastructure, security, testing, operations, vendors, and business stakeholders.
- Apply Agile, Scrum, Waterfall, or hybrid delivery approaches based on the needs of the initiative.
- Proactively identify delivery risks, resolve impediments, lead escalations, and drive decisions to closure.
- Manage release readiness, cutover planning, go-live governance, hypercare, and application support.
- Maintain and provide PSR reporting to management.
Hands-on Technical Leadership (Build)
- Provide hands-on technical leadership across frontend, backend, API, integration, database, security, deployment, and operational concerns.
- Design, build, and review enterprise applications using Java, Spring Boot, JavaScript/TypeScript, Node.js, React, REST APIs, microservices, and related technologies.
- Contribute to architecture and solution-design decisions, technical proof-of-concepts, code reviews, troubleshooting, and performance optimization.
- Guide engineering teams on secure coding, design patterns, scalability, resilience, maintainability, testing, and code-quality practices.
- Ensure effective implementation of CI/CD, automated testing, deployment automation, observability, and DevSecOps practices.
- Drive application modernization, cloud-native engineering, reusable components, engineering standards, and technical debt reduction.
- Ensure solutions meet enterprise expectations for security, reliability, performance, compliance, supportability, and cost effectiveness.
Product Management
- Partner with business stakeholders to define product vision, outcomes, roadmap, priorities, and value measures.
- Translate business goals and user needs into themes, capabilities, features, epics, and prioritized backlogs.
- Balance business value, customer needs, operational risk, architectural priorities, technical debt, and delivery capacity.
- Facilitate product discovery, requirement clarification, prioritization, release planning, and acceptance decisions.
- Use stakeholder feedback, service insights, usage data, and operational learning to drive continuous product improvement.
- Manage the product lifecycle, including introduction, growth, modernization, consolidation, and retirement where applicable.
Service Management (Run)
- Own the reliability, availability, performance, security, and supportability of assigned applications and services.
- Lead or oversee Incident, Major Incident, Problem, Change, Release, Knowledge, Capacity, Availability, and Continuity Management practices.
- Define, monitor, and review SLAs, OLAs, KPIs, service health indicators, operational risks, and improvement actions.
- Lead complex production troubleshooting, root-cause analysis, post-incident reviews, and preventive-action tracking.
- Drive service improvement, automation, monitoring, alerting, observability, resilience, disaster-recovery readiness, and reduction of recurring incidents.
- Coordinate with application support, infrastructure, cloud/platform, security, database, network, and vendor teams.
- Ensure smooth transition of new or changed solutions into production support with clear ownership, documentation, and support models.
Team & People Leadership
- Lead, coach, and develop multidisciplinary teams consisting of engineers, analysts, testers, support specialists, and project contributors.
- Set clear objectives, delivery expectations, accountabilities, and ways of working.
- Build team capability through mentoring, technical guidance, knowledge sharing, feedback, and development planning.
- Support workforce planning, recruitment, onboarding, succession planning, skills development, and capacity management.
- Promote a culture of collaboration, engineering excellence, ownership, transparency, inclusion, continuous improvement, and timely escalation.
- Manage globally distributed internal and external teams and create effective collaboration across locations and time zones.
Stakeholder, Financial & Vendor Management
- Act as a trusted technology partner for business, product, architecture, engineering, operations, and senior leadership stakeholders.
- Communicate complex technical and delivery topics clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
- Prepare decision papers, delivery updates, risk summaries, roadmap views, forecasts, and executive presentations.
- Manage project and service budgets, forecasts, resource utilization, commercial commitments, and cost optimization.
- Manage vendors and external partners through clear deliverables, quality expectations, service levels, governance, and performance follow-up.
- Facilitate decision-making, resolve cross-functional conflicts, and maintain alignment on priorities and outcomes.
Ready to embark on the journey? Here’s what we are looking for:
Education & Experience
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related discipline.
- 10-15 years of progressive experience across software engineering, technical delivery, project management, product delivery, or application/service management.
- Proven experience leading complex, cross-functional technology projects and enterprise application delivery.
Technical Competencies
- Strong hands-on programming experience in Java and/or JavaScript/TypeScript, including relevant frameworks such as Spring Boot, Node.js, and React.
- Proven experience designing, building, integrating, deploying, and supporting end-to-end enterprise-scale applications.
- Demonstrated experience with both Build and Run responsibilities for business-critical or mission-critical applications.
- Experience with product roadmaps, backlog prioritization, lifecycle management, and value-driven delivery.
- Strong knowledge of project/program management, Agile delivery, SDLC, DevOps/DevSecOps, and IT service management principles.
- Experience leading technical teams, developing people, managing capacity, and coordinating globally distributed stakeholders and delivery partners.
- Experience using project management and delivery tools such as Jira.
- Practical experience working in Agile and Scrum delivery environments.
- Good knowledge of IT infrastructure, including cloud platforms, networks, servers, databases, security, and deployment environments.
- Project management certification, such as PMP or PRINCE2.
Preferred Experience
- Experience delivering and operating mission-critical, customer-facing, or revenue-impacting applications.
- Experience with cloud-native development, OpenShift/Kubernetes, CI/CD platforms, infrastructure as code, and observability solutions.
- Experience in application modernization, legacy transformation, platform migration, system integration, and large-scale change.
- Experience managing external suppliers, outsourced delivery teams, and multi-vendor environments.
- Experience working in a global enterprise environment with distributed teams and complex stakeholder structures.
- Relevant certifications such as PMP, PRINCE2, Scrum/SAFe, Product Owner/Product Management, ITIL, Java, AWS, Azure, or GCP.
Core Competencies
- Hands-on technical credibility and engineering leadership
- End-to-end ownership and outcome orientation
- Project and program delivery discipline
- Product thinking and customer focus
- Service reliability and operational excellence
- People leadership, coaching, and capability building
- Strategic planning with strong execution focus
- Risk management and sound decision-making
- Stakeholder influence and executive communication
- Collaboration across business, technology, and vendors
Soft Skills
- Excellent communication, negotiation, facilitation, problem-solving, decision-making, and executive stakeholder-management skills.
- Ability to work independently, prioritize, and organize tasks under time and workload pressure.
- Advanced spoken and written English for effective cross-region collaboration in a multinational environment.
- Strategic mindset with a hands-on approach to problem-solving and innovation.
- Proactive, detail-oriented, and effective in cross-functional team environments.
An array of benefits for you:
- • Hybrid work arrangements to balance in-office collaboration and home flexibility.
- • Annual Leave: 42 days off apart from Public / National Holidays.
- • Medical Insurance: Self + Spouse + 2 children. An option to opt for Voluntary Parental Insurance (Parents / Parent -in-laws) at a nominal premium covering pre existing disease.
- • In House training programs: professional and technical training certifications.