Senior R&D Project Manager

Job description

Work Schedule Standard (Mon-Fri) Environmental Conditions Office Job Description

As part of the Thermo Fisher Scientific team, you’ll discover meaningful work that makes a positive impact on a global scale. Join our colleagues in bringing our Mission to life every single day to enable our customers to make the world healthier, cleaner and safer. We provide our global teams with the resources needed to achieve individual career goals while helping to take science a step beyond by developing solutions for some of the world’s toughest challenges, like protecting the environment, making sure our food is safe or helping find cures for cancer.

DESCRIPTION:

How you will make an impact: The Senior R&D Project Manager will lead complex software development projects from initiation through release, ensuring predictable execution, clear visibility into progress and risks, and successful delivery of commitments. This role is a senior individual contributor responsible for driving project execution across cross-functional teams without direct people management responsibility. Reporting to the Director, Engineering Delivery & Excellence, this role will support the organization’s focus on delivery predictability, execution discipline, release readiness, and continuous improvement. The Senior R&D Project Manager will manage projects across multiple software development lifecycle models, including Agile, Waterfall, and hybrid approaches, adapting project management practices to fit the project, team, product, and business unit process.

What you will contribute: •    Lead end-to-end execution of software development projects intended for commercial release, ensuring delivery against committed scope, schedule, quality, and business objectives. •    Develop and maintain project plans, schedules, milestone plans, dependency maps, risk registers, issue logs, resource plans, decision logs, and status reports. •    Manage projects across Agile, Waterfall, and hybrid delivery models, applying the appropriate planning, governance, and execution practices for each project and SDLC process. •    Facilitate project planning, sprint or increment planning, release planning, risk reviews, retrospectives, and stakeholder alignment meetings as appropriate for the delivery model. •    Partner with Engineering, Product Management, Program Management, and other stakeholders to define project objectives, deliverables, success criteria, and release expectations. •    Define, track and communicate project-level KPIs, delivery metrics and data-driven project status updates that provide stakeholders with transparent visibility into project health, including progress against plan, milestone adherence, delivery risks, dependencies, open decisions, resource impacts, and release readiness. •    Establish and maintain project governance, including meeting cadence, decision forums, escalation paths, documentation expectations, milestone tracking, and release readiness reviews. •    Proactively identify, assess, and manage risks, issues, assumptions, dependencies, and resource constraints; escalate with clear recommendations, options, and trade-offs when needed. •    Drive accountability across cross-functional teams to ensure timely completion of deliverables and resolution of blockers. •    Ensure project execution aligns with applicable SDLC processes, business unit governance expectations, quality requirements, and other relevant standards. •    Represent Engineering project management in cross-functional program forums as needed, ensuring engineering plans, risks, dependencies, and trade-offs are clearly communicated and understood. •    Partner with the Director, Engineering Delivery & Excellence and cohort to support improvements to project management practices, operating mechanisms, metrics, templates, and delivery reporting. •    Contribute to continuous improvement initiatives that improve engineering delivery predictability, efficiency, quality, and stakeholder visibility. •    Serve as a senior project management resource and role model for execution discipline, stakeholder communication, risk management, and structured problem solving.

REQUIREMENTS:

Required: •    Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Business, Project Management, or a related field •    7+ years of experience managing software development, R&D, technical, or new product development projects •    Experience managing software projects intended for commercial product release •    Demonstrated experience managing projects using Agile, Waterfall, and hybrid delivery approaches •    Strong understanding of software development lifecycle processes, including requirements, design, development, verification, testing, deployment and release •    Experience leading cross-functional project teams in a matrixed organization without direct authority •    Strong ability to manage scope, schedule, dependencies, risks, issues, resources, and stakeholder expectations •    Ability to communicate project status, risks, options, and trade-offs clearly to technical and non-technical audiences •    Strong facilitation, problem-solving, decision management, and escalation skills •    Experience supporting global or distributed engineering teams •    Proficiency with project management and collaboration tools such as Jira, Azure DevOps, Smartsheet, Microsoft Project, Confluence, SharePoint, or similar tools

Preferred: •    PMP, PMI-ACP, Certified ScrumMaster, SAFe, or similar project management or Agile certification •    Experience working in a regulated or quality-driven environment •    Familiarity with quality management systems, GxP, ISO, FDA 21 CFR Part 11, and cybersecurity expectations •    Experience improving project management processes, reporting, metrics, or SDLC execution practices •    Experience with Power BI or similar data visualization/reporting tools •    Practical understanding of AI-assisted engineering and analytics to improve software delivery visibility, project health monitoring, and reporting efficiency

Key Competencies: •    Software project execution leadership •    Delivery predictability and operational discipline •    Agile, Waterfall, and hybrid SDLC fluency •    Cross-functional stakeholder alignment •    Strategic thinking and ability to self-prioritize •    Risk, issue, and dependency management •    Influence without direct authority •    Clear communication and leadership-ready reporting •    Comfort operating in ambiguity •    Continuous improvement mindset •    Systems thinking across complex delivery environments •    Strong ownership and accountability •    Able to build and facilitate a high-trust, collaborative workplace culture