Senior Project Manager – Client Pilots and Strategic Partnerships

Our portfolio company is hiring a hands-on Senior Project Manager to establish disciplined delivery across client pilots and strategic partner projects. You will turn commercial intent and technical ambition into executable plans, align resources from several companies, maintain the complete set of project artefacts, and make progress, decisions, risks and acceptance criteria visible. The role is central to delivering projects on time and to agreed expectations while allowing customer, product and technical teams to focus on their specialist work.

About Our Portfolio Company

Our portfolio company is an agtech company delivering digital scouting and agronomic decision support to commercial growers, propagators, nurseries and seed producers. Its proprietary platform combines optical zoom cameras and computer vision to monitor crops daily, identify early visible signs of pests, diseases and other plant issues, and support scouting and treatment decisions. The company has customers in Canada, the Netherlands, Greece, the United Kingdom and other markets, and plans to grow across these geographies and worldwide. It also works with technology partners on integrations and hybrid solutions, including greenhouse robotics.

Role Mandate

You will own project governance and delivery from handover and initiation through testing, acceptance, closure and lessons learned. The portfolio includes customer pilots, deployments into new crops or use cases, software and data integrations, and joint projects with external technology companies. Many projects involve several organisations, a mix of hardware, software, computer vision and greenhouse operations, and dependencies that must be actively managed rather than simply tracked.

Key Responsibilities

• Turn each signed proposal or approved project concept into a clear project charter, plan and governance model, with objectives, deliverables, resourcing and measurable acceptance criteria agreed by all parties before work begins.

• Build and maintain integrated project plans and decision, risk and issue logs; establish reporting cadences, control changes to scope, timing and resources, and escalate early with clear options and recommendations.

• Coordinate contributions from clients, partners and internal teams across Product, Engineering, Machine Learning, DevOps, Customer Success and Sales, translating between business, agronomic and technical stakeholders and actively managing external dependencies.

• Launch every client pilot from a repeatable template that tests a specific customer-value hypothesis, and close it formally with acceptance, lessons learned and a clean handover to Customer Success or Product.

• Build a lightweight, reusable project framework and maintain a portfolio view of active projects, capacity and delivery confidence for management.

Required Experience 

• Several years of hands-on project management experience delivering complex technology, software, data, AI, IoT or systems-integration projects with external customers, partners and multiple companies, including cross-functional teams and contributors over whom you have no direct authority.
• Strong command of core project disciplines — scope, schedule, resources, dependencies, risks and issues, change control, test planning, acceptance and closure — with the ability to turn ambiguous objectives into structured, testable plans and to challenge unrealistic commitments constructively.
• Experience creating concise, decision-oriented project reporting and maintaining disciplined project documentation.
• Sufficient technical literacy to work confidently with software engineers, product managers, ML or data specialists and infrastructure teams; coding expertise is not required.
• Fluent Russian for daily work with the internal team and strong professional English for meetings, documents and negotiations with international clients and partners; willingness and ability to travel internationally.
• High ownership, attention to detail and calm judgement under pressure, with the confidence to escalate and secure decisions.

Nice to have

• Knowledge of or experience in agriculture, commercial horticulture, greenhouse technology or agtech, or relevant education in agronomy, horticulture or a related field; working knowledge of crop protection or greenhouse operations.
• Experience with computer vision, machine learning, robotics, camera systems, IoT, data integrations or combined hardware and software delivery.
• Experience designing and running pilots, proofs of concept or field trials with measurable acceptance criteria.
• Understanding of Agile product development together with the judgement to use milestone-based or hybrid delivery for cross-company projects.
• Formal project management training or certification such as PMP, PRINCE2, IPMA or equivalent (practical delivery evidence matters more than certification), or experience setting up a project-management function or PMO-lite framework in a growing company.

Candidate Profile

You are a structured, pragmatic delivery leader who is comfortable operating between greenhouse reality and technical complexity. You distinguish activity from progress, documentation from bureaucracy and optimism from an executable commitment. You create enough structure to make work predictable, adapt it to the size of the project, and remain personally accountable for getting decisions made and outcomes delivered.