Open Position: Technical Project Manager

About MAQ Software

As Microsoft Power BI Partner of the Year 2021, we enable leading companies to accelerate their BI and analytics initiatives. Our solutions enable our clients to improve their operations, reduce costs, increase sales, and build stronger customer relationships.

Our clients consistently recognize us for providing architecture and governance frameworks, implementing best practices to optimize reports, and building team capability through training programs. Our innovative tools and 43 certified visuals expand Power BI capabilities to save time for decision makers.

As a premier supplier to Microsoft for two decades, our clients benefit from our extensive insights into the platform and engineering practices. Microsoft has awarded us seven specializations for meeting Microsoft's highest standards of service delivery. Our clients improve their implementations with the breadth and depth of our expertise.

With globally integrated teams in Redmond, Washington, and Mumbai, Hyderabad, and NOIDA India, we deliver solutions with increased velocity and tech intensity. Our daily delivery and feedback model offers the flexibility to adapt solutions to changing business needs.

Inc. magazine has recognized us for sustained growth by listing us on the Inc. 5000 list eleven times – a rare honor.

Engineering culture

At MAQ Software, we foster a strong engineering culture with a can-do attitude. Our key managers come from excellent educational backgrounds and have significant experience in growing a company and mentoring software engineers. Due to our smaller size, we are agile and able to adopt the latest technologies and computing trends ahead of larger industry players.

As a part of our globally distributed engineering team, our engineers gain exposure to the latest software engineering practices and fast development cycles, providing them with the opportunity to work on challenging technical problems that utilize cutting-edge technologies for fast-paced software delivery. Our collaborative and supportive work environment encourages innovation and growth, making our company an exciting and rewarding place to work.

Examples of some of our projects:

• We built an analytics platform for a leading fintech company using Azure services, enabling them to scale to 1000+ customers and provide self-service, near real-time analytics. Our solution, based on Azure Synapse, Azure Data Lake Storage, Azure Data Factory, Azure Databricks, and Power BI, followed the best practices of the Azure Well-Architected Framework, and leveraged migration strategies from Microsoft’s Cloud Adoption Framework. Our automated deployment framework reduced setup time from days to hours. The platform now offers powerful self-service analytics, enabling their customers to reach millions of borrowers faster and easily integrate machine learning models for innovation.
• We helped an organic supermarket chain migrate to Microsoft Power BI and Azure Synapse to improve their reporting and data analytics capabilities. The previous system was time-consuming, error-prone, and offered limited visualization and self-service capabilities. With the new solution, the client can now perform direct queries between front-end Power BI reports and back-end data, enabling real-time insights and a holistic view across teams. Azure Synapse also provides higher data security. The migration resulted in automatic report generation, reduced operational costs, increased return on investment, and better business decisions.
• We developed a chatbot for the Arizona Department of Economic Security to improve its Program Service Evaluator (PSE) training. The chatbot used Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services to answer PSE questions based on the policy manual of various state benefit programs. The chatbot learned from user feedback and crawled the policy content automatically. The chatbot increased evaluation efficiency, reduced senior staff time, and provided conversational responses to PSEs. The chatbot integrated seamlessly into the PSEs’ workflow and was accessible through a web interface and Skype for Business.
• Our client, a leader in the energy and utilities sector, needed a scalable solution to analyze large volumes of IoT data from diverse applications. We used Power BI and Azure Data Explorer ingest, transform, and visualize semi-structured JSON data from network logs. Our solution reduced the data refresh time, handled dynamic schema changes and enabled comprehensive analysis using Direct Query mode. Our client gained real-time insights and a competitive edge in the industry with our robust and effective solution. The solution also facilitated efficient data ingestion and transformation, effectively tackled issues pertaining to data refresh and dynamic schema of data.
• We helped a multinational food and beverage chain to improve its sales forecasting accuracy by building a hybrid machine learning model on Azure Databricks. The model used historical sales, weather, and event data to predict future sales and analyze the impact of various factors on sales. The model also detected and explained seasonal and daily spikes and lag periods. Our model reduced the MAPE value from 0.13 to 0.09 and enabled the client to make better business decisions.

To read about some of our recent projects, visit https://maqsoftware.com/case-studies

A Typical Day in Technical Project Manager:

• 8:30 a.m. - Start of Day: Your day begins in the office, setting the tone and preparing for the upcoming tasks.
• 9:00 a.m. - Global Management Meeting: You engage in discussions with the global management team, which might include the Principal Consultant and key company managers. The goal is to review the previous day's progress and set the day's priorities. This often involves a quick review of Azure DevOps (ADO) and emails from US customer teams to identify and address any outstanding issues.
• Morning Scrum: Transition into a daily scrum meeting with a diverse project team, featuring developers and project managers from the US and India. This is where you'll adapt to evolving customer requirements and ensure tasks are effectively delegated, especially if key team members are absent.
• 11:00 a.m. - Best Practices Session: You have the option to join a session focused on the security development lifecycle and its implications for your projects. The session typically has around 30 team members in attendance. Alternatively, you may opt to spend this time assessing the latest software build, focusing on its functionality and user experience.
• Team Lunch: Enjoy a weekly gathering in the cafeteria, a chance for all team members to connect and share. Occasionally, meals might be sponsored as a token of appreciation for team achievements.
• Afternoon - Quality Checks and Build Review: Post-lunch, anticipate a fresh build. Your role includes ensuring that the quality process team is well-informed, and wiki pages are updated with current configurations. There might also be instances where you'll collaborate with developers to address challenges, refine algorithms, and introduce them to valuable resources.
• One-on-One Meetings: Occasionally, you'll have 20-minute individual meetings with team members. These sessions offer an opportunity to address specific concerns, provide feedback, and align on goals.
• HR Collaboration: You engage in weekly meetings with the human resources team, focusing on team needs, growth strategies, and upcoming interviews. Your input is valuable in these discussions.
• Customer Readiness Review: Your day may also involve reviewing daily software builds and status emails, ensuring everything aligns with customer readiness criteria.
• Collaboration with Pre-sales Team: From time to time, you'll collaborate with the pre-sales team, offering your insights into RFP responses and validating effort estimates. Your expertise, particularly in understanding platforms like Microsoft Azure, will be essential in these interactions.
• 7:30 p.m. - Day's Wrap Up: Your day typically concludes with a comprehensive review, ensuring all teams are aligned and informed about the day's outcomes and goals for the following day.

Job Description:

We are currently seeking experienced and highly motivated Technical Project Manager(s) who possess extensive knowledge in data management and an innate ability to grasp and implement the latest advancements in Microsoft platforms. Our clientele spans various industries, including retail, technology, healthcare, insurance, and more. These clients consist of sales and marketing professionals who leverage the internet to connect with consumers and businesses on a global scale.

In this role, you will assume technical leadership, guiding a dedicated team in the development and delivery of software applications. Given your comprehensive understanding of the global software industry, we anticipate your invaluable contribution as we aim to expand our engineering workforce from 1,000 to 2,500 worldwide in the upcoming years. Within two years of joining us, we expect you to manage a customer unit consisting of 30 to 60 highly talented engineers. As our expansion plans take shape, your insights will be instrumental in account mining and swift sales support activities.

Your responsibilities encompass both technical and managerial aspects, ensuring timely delivery across multiple high-velocity projects.

Your key result areas as a percentage of your overall work items will be:

Team Management and Development (30%)

• Manage a dedicated team of 30 to 60 software engineers.
• Ensure optimal resource allocation across multiple projects.
• Oversee project planning and tracking.
• Undertake all necessary Program Management tasks.
• Manage personnel through bi-annual performance reviews, coaching, and performance enhancement strategies.
• Foster collaboration by annually visiting the Redmond and other Indian teams for one to two weeks.

Delivery Ownership for Business Groups (30%)

• Play a pivotal role in defining and executing requirements and feature sets.
• Rigorously review project deliverables, focusing on functionality, usability, security, architecture, code quality, scalability, and performance.
• Support multiple release schedules with approximately 12 releases annually, indicating a release frequency beyond the typical yearly cycle.

Technical Architecture and Problem Solving (20%)

• Chart out and refine architecture and technical designs for projects.
• Conduct weekly design and code reviews.

Recruitment, Process Innovation, and Training (15%)

• Spearhead innovations in the company's operational model.
• Mentor and train teams for peak performance, facilitating training for around 10 experienced hires and 40 novice developers annually.
• Expand the team by conducting an average of 10 interviews weekly and leveraging industry networks.

Pre-sales and Customer Engagement (5%)

• Offer technical pre-sales support, showcasing our robust technical capabilities to potential clients.
• Review and respond to RFPs, providing project planning and effort estimations for 12 to 24 projects every year.

This is a unique opportunity involving technical management responsibility with a growing organization as part of the core management team.

Candidate Profile:

• Bachelor’s and/or master’s degree in computer science/engineering from a leading university
• An MBA from one of the leading management institutes (IIMs or equivalent) will be an added advantage.
• Must have team management experience.
• Previous work experience in IT or ITeS firms
• Strong technical background in Microsoft platform with the ability to develop specifications and work with the project team.
• Strong project management skills and ability to handle two to five projects at a time.
• Strong customer interaction skills with exposure to international clients
• Must possess strong process definition and implementation skills.
• Excellent communication and people skills - able to communicate with diverse audiences with confidence, clarity, and focus.

Experience: 6 years or more

Compensation: CTC 22 - 30 Lakhs p.a.

location: Express Trade Towers 2, Second Floor, B-36, Sector 132, Noida 201301

Ideas for Candidates Interested in Preparing for Interview:

• Go through some of the work we do https://maqsoftware.com/case-studies
• Review Founder’s Mentality by Bain and Company
  1. h ttp://www.bain.com/publications/business- insights/founders-mentality.aspx
• Review What I Did Not Learn in B – School and What I Did Not Learn at IIT book by Rajeev Agarwal, Founder and Managing Consultant to learn about the company culture.
• Display your interest and aptitude in the technology services industry.

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