Senior R&D Project Manager

Senior R&D Project Manager- Hybrid | Cary, NC 

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About the job

The SaaS team is looking for a Senior R&D Project Manager to lead the planning and execution of projects supporting SAS’s Software as a Service offering. Our team operates at the forefront of software innovation at SAS, helping shape how our products evolve into cloud-native, CI/CD-driven solutions built for the future.

This role is responsible for ensuring projects are delivered predictably, aligned to business goals, and executed with high quality across a dynamic, globally distributed environment. You will partner closely with engineering, product, and cross-functional teams to drive execution, manage dependencies, and ensure alignment across stakeholders.

You will operate across the full project lifecycle from planning and estimation through execution and delivery while helping teams navigate complexity in a modern, CI/CD driven SaaS environment.

We’re a collaborative, supportive, and high-performing team that values curiosity, ownership, and continuous improvement—and we’d love for you to be part of what we’re building.

As a Senior R&D Project Manager, you will:

• Leads deadline-driven, team-based projects by facilitating clear objectives, requirements, scope, goals, and committed outcomes with teams and stakeholders.
• Plans, prioritizes, forecasts, implements, and adjusts delivery schedules, scope, resourcing, and quality in consultation with project stakeholders, maintaining focus on committed work.
• Negotiates resource needs and coordinates technical resources for assigned projects, including both domestic and international resources.
• Maintains accurate project plans, delivery forecasts, schedules, decision logs, action items, issue lists, risk registers, and status reports that provide transparent progress and work-item visibility across teams.
• Coordinates and communicates activities across team members and stakeholders, facilitates effective meetings, and drives action-item ownership and follow-up to keep projects on schedule and resolve conflict.
• Identifies, tracks, and coordinates risks and delivery impediments, including blocked or aging work, and drives mitigation and early escalation as appropriate.
• Manages project scope and expectations. Identifies and constructively negotiates conflicts or areas of high risk
• Leverages methodologies, processes, project tools, and best practices to accelerate project delivery.
• Identifies and coordinates project dependencies and stakeholder influences; monitors cross-team handoffs and wait states; and works jointly with organizations that share responsibility for delivery.
• Serves as a central point of contact across the Company, including Legal, Marketing, and SAS.com, to maintain alignment and project success.
• Manages multiple large scale complex projects.
• Determines and evolves methods and procedures on new assignments.
• Provides timely, audience-appropriate delivery information to stakeholders and interacts with senior and executive management as needed, clearly communicating whether work is on track, what is blocked, which dependencies threaten delivery, and where decisions are pending.
• Embrace curiosity, passion, authenticity and accountability. These are our values and influence everything we do.

 Required qualifications

• 8 years of experience in software project management, preferably in agile environments.
• Bachelor's degree in a quantitative field, preferably in Computer Science or a related discipline
• Proven experience delivering projects end-to-end across planning, execution, and delivery
• Strong experience working in SaaS or continuous delivery environments
• Excellent stakeholder management skills, including negotiation, communication, and conflict resolution
• Equivalent combination of related education, training and experience may be considered in place of the above qualifications.

 Additional competencies, knowledge and skills

• Communication - Conveying information and ideas clearly and concisely to individuals or groups in an engaging manner that helps them understand and retain the message; listening actively to others.
• Driving for results - Setting high goals for personal and group accomplishment; using measurement methods to monitor progress toward goals; tenaciously working to meet or exceed goals while deriving satisfaction from that achievement and continuous improvement.
• Building Trusting Relationships - Using appropriate interpersonal styles to establish effective relationships with customers and internal partners; interacting with others in a way that promotes openness and trust and gives them confidence in one’s intentions.
• Experience with Jira or similar tools
• PMP, CSM or equivalent certifications
• Ability to influence without authority
• Ability to manage pressure, deadlines, and competing priorities

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You are welcome here.

At SAS, it’s not about fitting into our culture – it’s about adding to it. We believe our people make the difference. Our inclusive workforce brings together unique talents and inspires teams to create amazing software that reflects the diversity of our users and customers.

Additional Information:

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