Job Title: Project Manager - Technology Modernisation & Design System

Location: London / Oxford
Salary/Rate: £600-£690 a day Inside IR35
Start Date: October 2026
Job Type: Contract - 10 Months (Until July 2027)

Company Introduction

We have an exciting opportunity available with a leading global publishing organisation. They are currently looking for an experienced Project Manager to support two strategic technology initiatives, covering platform modernisation and enterprise-wide design system transformation.

This is an excellent opportunity to work across technology, engineering, architecture, product and design teams, driving delivery across complex projects with significant business impact.

Job Responsibilities/Objectives

You will be responsible for managing delivery across two concurrent technology projects, ensuring clear planning, effective governance and strong coordination between technical and business stakeholders.

1. Project Planning & Governance: Own and maintain integrated project plans, milestones, delivery schedules, governance activities and senior stakeholder reporting across both projects, maintaining an agreed 50/50 allocation of time.

2. Technology Modernisation: Coordinate delivery across technical workstreams involving service and platform replacements, migration towards AWS EKS and microservices, and data warehouse migration to Snowflake.

3. Design System Transformation: Manage delivery plans for component consolidation and product migrations, coordinating engineering, product and design teams through implementation, stabilisation and legacy system retirement.

4. Risk & Dependency Management: Identify and manage risks, issues, assumptions and cross-team dependencies, escalating blockers early and providing practical recommendations to support decision-making.

5. Stakeholder & Resource Management: Work closely with technical and business stakeholders to align priorities, monitor progress, manage resources and forecasts, and communicate delivery confidence, changes and trade-offs.

6. Release & Transition Readiness: Coordinate testing, release planning, operational readiness and adoption activities to ensure changes are successfully implemented and supported.

Required Skills/Experience

The ideal candidate will have the following:

1. Proven experience as a Project Manager delivering complex technology, digital transformation or platform modernisation projects from planning through to implementation and transition.

2. Strong project management and governance experience, including integrated planning, milestone tracking, risk and issue management, dependency mapping and senior-level reporting.

3. Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills, with the ability to coordinate teams across engineering, architecture, product, design and business functions.

4. Practical experience working with Agile, Lean or iterative delivery methodologies and tools such as Jira, Confluence or Microsoft Project.

5. Experience managing multiple workstreams, competing priorities, delivery schedules, resources and forecasts within a complex technology environment.

6. A proactive, delivery-focused approach, with the ability to resolve blockers, facilitate decisions and maintain momentum across interdependent projects.

Desirable Skills/Experience

Although not essential, the following skills are desired by the client:

1. Experience with cloud platform modernisation, microservices or infrastructure transformation, ideally involving AWS EKS.

2. Experience with data warehouse migration or modernisation, particularly Snowflake.

3. Exposure to design systems, component libraries, design system consolidation or large-scale product migration programmes.

4. Experience managing multiple concurrent projects within an enterprise technology or shared services environment.

5. Background in publishing, research, information services or other data-rich organisations.

6. Experience with legacy system decommissioning, platform stabilisation, release readiness and operational handover.

Benefits & Perks

The company offers standard corporate benefits, including:

1. Opportunity to contribute to strategic technology transformation initiatives within a globally recognised organisation.

2. Exposure to cloud modernisation, data migration and enterprise design system delivery.

3. Collaboration with multidisciplinary teams across technology, engineering, product and design.

4. A varied contract role combining technical project delivery with business-wide transformation.

If you are interested in this opportunity, please apply now with your updated CV in Microsoft Word/PDF format.

Disclaimer

Notwithstanding any guidelines given to level of experience sought, we will consider candidates from outside this range if they can demonstrate the necessary competencies.

Square One is acting as both an employment agency and an employment business, and is an equal opportunities recruitment business. Square One embraces diversity and will treat everyone equally. Please see our website for our full diversity statement.