Senior Project Manager - Scrum Master

About Emerald

Emerald’s talented and experienced teams grow our customers’ businesses 365 days a year with products that create connections, deliver content, and drive commerce. We produce over 140 annual events, create and deliver content through print and digital channels, and power commerce through our seamlessly integrated in-person and digital platforms and channels. For more information, please visit http://www.emeraldx.com.

Forge (Emerald X) is seeking an experienced Senior Data Platform Project Manager / Agile Scrum Master to lead execution across our enterprise data platform and analytics portfolio. This role will provide project leadership and Scrum facilitation for the teams building and operating Forge's data foundation, including data ingestion and integration, data lakehouse and warehouse capabilities, master data, governance, semantic models, business intelligence, and reporting.

The role will lead initiatives from discovery and backlog definition through design, development, QA, user acceptance testing, deployment, and closeout. The successful candidate will bring structure, transparency, and delivery discipline to a cross-functional team of data engineers, architects, analysts, product owners, business stakeholders, and implementation partners. This is a hands-on delivery leadership role, not a data engineering role, but it requires sufficient technical fluency to understand data pipelines, integrations, cloud platforms, dependencies, and release risks.

The Senior Data Platform Project Manager / Agile Scrum Master will manage multiple concurrent initiatives, facilitate the Agile operating cadence, remove impediments, maintain delivery artifacts, and provide clear communication to both technical teams and senior business leaders.

Key Responsibilities

•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.

Required Qualifications

•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.

Preferred Qualifications

•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.

Success Profile

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.

About Emerald

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. 

COMPENSATION & BENEFITS

Target Compensation: $130,000 - $140,000 base plus Bonus

Please note that this range reflects a reasonable estimate of the target compensation for this position. This range may ultimately vary based on a candidate’s qualifications and may be higher where required by applicable law. 

We offer a competitive benefits package designed to strengthen our employees’ physical and mental health, including unlimited vacation for exempt employees, flexible working locations, 401(k) plan with a company match, medical/dental/vision coverage with inclusive provisions including transgender services and fertility benefits, parental and caregiver leave, dependent, commuter and FSA benefits, professional development programs like Toastmasters, and mental wellness tools.

If you need accommodation in our application process or have questions about our posted salary range, please email our Talent Acquisition team at [email protected].