Operations Project Manager

From the company's job description

OPERATIONS PROJECT MANAGER

Full-time, onsite | Houston, Texas | Reports to the Director of Operations | Regular travel to Switzerland and to manufacturing and customer sites

We are challenging the energy sector with our innovative fuel cell technology to decarbonize power generation. Are you the right person to join our dynamic and growing team?

ABOUT EH GROUP ENGINEERING

EHG is a rapidly growing fuel cell power platform delivering onsite power to data centers, defense and industry, and mobile power to the aviation and maritime sectors. Our fuel-agnostic proton exchange membrane (PEM) systems run on natural gas, biogas or hydrogen, with options for integrated carbon capture and heat recovery. Founded in Switzerland, EHG is now expanding into the United States, fueled by a GW-scale, late-stage pipeline of US data center customers and a soon-to-be-announced major investment round.

As we move from prototyping into full-scale execution, we have 15 to 25+ major projects in flight at once, spanning our Swiss engineering and product teams and our US manufacturing stand-up, customer deployments, supply chain, facilities and hiring. Today they are held together by people rather than systems. We are hiring a hands-on project manager to replace that with something durable: one integrated view of the portfolio, a real dependency map and an operating cadence the team trusts. This role drives the schedule rather than reporting on it. It is a build-it role for someone who has already brought order to a fast-moving, under-structured environment once, and wants to do it again with more ownership.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Own the integrated master schedule across all 15 to 25+ active projects in one place, with the cross-project dependency map and the critical path through them

• Drive the schedule: set and defend milestone dates, push owners to commit, and escalate early when a date is at risk rather than reporting the miss afterward

• Force trade-offs in advance when projects compete for the same people, parts or weeks, and build the capacity picture that shows where we are over-committed before we commit further

• Keep small slips from compounding: when one date moves, know the same day what else moves with it and who needs to hear about it

• Establish and run the operating cadence (planning, weekly execution reviews and monthly portfolio reviews) and support the reporting that goes to leadership and the Board

• Run risk, issue and change management, track decisions to closure, and chase down blockers so things move between the meetings

• Define the minimum standards every project follows (scope, schedule, milestones, risks, actions, issues, decisions and status), light enough that teams use them without being told twice

• Lead the stand-up of our project management platform: evaluate the options, make a recommendation, implement it, and own the migration from spreadsheets and status decks to a single source of truth

• Own the configuration, administration and data quality of the platform, and keep improving it as the portfolio grows from 20 projects to 60+

• Build the reporting and dashboards so status is generated rather than assembled by hand, and anyone can see where a project stands without having to ask

• Run one portfolio across Switzerland and the United States, with the same schedule, definitions and view of status on both sides, working across time zones without losing days to them

• Manage the handoffs between Swiss engineering and US manufacturing and operations, where most of our dependencies and most of our risk live

• Partner with project and functional owners across engineering, manufacturing, supply chain, customer deployment and finance so the process serves them rather than taxes them

• Give the CEO, CTO and COO a clear portfolio view of what is on track, what is at risk and what needs a decision, and shape how the function scales, including the first hire on your team

SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE REQUIRED

• Roughly 4 to 7 years of experience in project, program or PMO roles, with meaningful time at an early-stage or high-growth company, ideally in energy, hardware, manufacturing or another capital-intensive environment

• PMP certification (Project Management Professional, PMI)

• A track record of driving schedules, not only reporting them: comfortable telling a senior engineer that their date does not work, with the credibility and the data to make it stick

• Direct experience bringing structure to an organization that did not have it: standing up a PMO, a portfolio process or a project management platform, including what you built, what you deliberately left out and how you got people to adopt it

• Hands-on depth in a modern project management platform (for example Jira, Smartsheet, Asana, Monday or Planview), including configuration and administration, not only use

• Comfort managing dependencies across many concurrent projects, and the judgment to know which need escalation

• Experience working across sites, countries and time zones, with the discipline that makes distributed work move rather than stall

• Strong influence without authority: the process only works if project owners choose to use it

• A bias to action and a pragmatic view of process: enough structure to make the chaos legible, not so much that it slows the company down

• Excellent written and verbal communication in English, and the ability to work independently in a lean, global team

• Willing to be based onsite in Houston and to travel regularly, including to Switzerland

• Must have existing authorization to work in the United States

DESIRABLE

• Experience taking a company through the transition from prototype to volume production

• Experience incorporating AI into project management to enable organization-level speed

• Exposure to large-scale customer deployments, construction or EPC-style project delivery

• Data and reporting skills, including building dashboards and automating status rather than assembling it by hand

• An engineering or technical background

• Working proficiency in French

WHAT WE OFFER

• The opportunity to build EHG’s global project management function from the ground up, rather than maintain an existing one

• Close work with the Director of Operations and, through the portfolio view, with the CEO, CTO and COO

• Competitive compensation with equity

• Relocation support within the US

Start date: Immediately

Only candidates selected for interview will be contacted.

EH Group Engineering is an equal opportunity employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, veteran status or any other characteristic protected by law.