Technical Project Manager

AUX Studio | Woodstock, Cape Town | Remote / Hybrid | Full-time

About the role

We're looking for a Technical Project Manager to lead the end-to-end delivery of client work at AUX.

That means owning projects and retainers from kick-off through to delivery, keeping scope, timelines and budgets honest, and making sure the team has clear priorities and a workload they can actually sustain. You'll be the person clients rely on to know where things stand, and the person the team turns to when something needs unblocking.

A note on how we see this role: project management here is a support function, not a command one. You're not there to police the team, you're there to give them clarity, cover and room to do their best work while also managing client expectations and work quality.

We're a small studio (14 people) offering extremely well-designed digital products for clients across Canada, South Africa, and the US. You'll be given real ownership quickly, and you'll be working directly with our Operations Manager and the Director rather than through layers. While also having the support of the experts who are doing the work and who also have high contact and participation in client meetings. You're not alone.

Why AUX

You can read more about why to join AUX here.

The work

The range is the interesting part, and it's the part worth thinking about before you apply.

Across a given quarter you might be running projects like:

• Brand, strategy and creative work for client marketing teams. Brand systems, visual identity, motion design, campaign assets. Iterative, taste-driven, and often on a retainer where the shape of the work changes month to month.
• Product research and design. Discovery, user research, UX and UI. Ambiguous at the start by design, with the value in asking better questions rather than moving faster.
• Design systems, both designed and coded. Long-horizon, technical, dependency-heavy, with real consequences downstream when something is wrong.
• Web and platform builds. Defined scope, small and enterprise-level, real deadlines, environments and releases, and a client who needs to know when it's live.

These need genuinely different approaches. A motion design retainer for a marketing team doesn't want a sprint ceremony imposed on it. A coded design system can't be run on vibes (it's enterprise software) or a shared Google Doc. Research needs protected space to be open-ended, and a platform build needs to be delivered according to what was scoped.

Knowing which format or cycle a project is in, and adjusting how you run it accordingly, is most of the craft of this job. We're not looking for someone with one methodology they apply to everything.

Above and beyond this, it's about supporting people. Balancing different personalities and bringing different teams together. Aligning them to the same goals and objectives.

What you'll be doing

Delivery
Own project setup, planning and delivery across discovery, execution, release and handover. Build and maintain delivery plans covering milestones, resourcing and dependencies. Run the rituals that suit the project, whether that's stand-ups, sprint planning or a weekly status call. Coordinate across design, dev, QA and content so handovers are clean.

Scope and change
Set a clear scope baseline and hold it. Log change requests, coordinate estimates, communicate the impact, get approval, update the plan. Head off scope creep before it becomes a conversation nobody enjoys.

Budget
Track budgets, burn rate and forecasts to completion. Flag risks early and bring solutions, not just problems. Work with Operations on billing readiness and timesheet accuracy.

Risk
Keep a live view of risks, assumptions, issues and dependencies. Spot trouble early, escalate with context and a proposed way forward.

Communication
Be the primary point of contact for delivery. Run structured updates with agendas, notes and decisions logged. Make sure the right people are in the room for the calls that matter. Manage expectations calmly, especially when things are tight.

Quality and close-out
Make sure acceptance criteria and sign-off checkpoints are defined and followed. Run retros, and turn what comes out of them into actual changes to templates and ways of working. Leave projects tidy: organised Drive, clear naming, final files marked, handover documented.

Team
Surface overload, unclear priorities and role confusion early. Support new team members through onboarding with context, priorities and a realistic ramp-up.

What we're looking for

• A completed tertiary qualification (diploma or degree). Project management, business, design, or a technical field is ideal, but we're more interested in the discipline than the subject.
• Minimum 5 years of project management experience, with at least 3 of those delivering digital work in an agency, studio, or product environment.
• Experience across more than one kind of work. Creative or brand delivery alongside product or build work, rather than a decade of only one.
• A UX, design or development background is a strong advantage.
• The judgement to pick a delivery approach that fits the project instead of applying a fixed process to everything.
• Strong planning and organisation, with a track record of creating clarity out of mess.
• Confident and consistent client communication and stakeholder management.
• Solid scope control, prioritisation and follow-through.
• Comfort with budgets, burn and commercial constraints.
• Ability to run a meeting that ends with decisions and owners.

Nice to have:

• Comfort facilitating technical conversations without needing to be an engineer yourself.
• Ability to translate technical constraints into timelines, risks and client-friendly updates.
• Familiarity with dev workflows: tickets, sprints, releases, environments.
• Solid understanding of agile methodologies.
• A recognised PM certification (e.g. Scrum Master, Agile) is useful but not required.

Who you are

The hard skills get you into the interview. This section is what actually makes someone good at this job, and it's the part we weigh most heavily.

High EQ is non-negotiable. Reading a room, noticing when someone is drowning before they say so, knowing when to push and when to back off. That's the core of the job here, not a bonus attribute.

You lead by supporting, not directing. PMs at AUX are not dictators. We're not looking for someone who manages by deadline threat, hovers over people's shoulders, or treats the team as resources to be allocated. If your instinct when a project wobbles is to tighten control and start demanding hourly updates, this isn't the right studio for you. The best PMs we've worked with clear obstacles, protect focus, and make it easy for good people to do good work.

No ego. You'll chase a missing file or reformat a spreadsheet if that's what's needed. You're happy for the team to get the credit. You can be wrong in front of people without it costing you anything.

Calm under pressure. Deadlines slip, clients change their minds, someone gets sick mid-sprint. You're a stabilising presence when that happens, not another source of noise.

Direct without being abrasive. You can tell a client the timeline has moved, or tell a colleague their timesheets are three weeks behind, and have both conversations land well. Kind and clear, not vague and nice.

You actually care how the team is doing. Not as a soft add-on to the delivery work. Sustainable teams do better work, and part of your job is protecting that.

Genuinely curious about the work. You want to understand what the team is building and why, not just when it'll be done.

Proactive by default. You'd rather raise something awkward early than explain it late.

Our stack

Linear, Harvest, Google Workspace, Slack, Figma and Miro.

We use Claude daily, and we mean properly rather than as a novelty. It's part of how we plan, write, analyse and build, and it has genuinely changed how quickly we can move. You don't need to arrive an expert, but you do need to be curious about it and willing to work out where it helps.

You'll also live in the Microsoft ecosystem when working with clients. Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, Excel and PowerPoint. Several of our clients run on it, so being comfortable moving between both worlds matters.

The package

• Remote / Hybrid - Up to 4 days in office p/m (Old Castle Brewery, Woodstock, Cape Town)
• Laptop
• Adapter for Mac laptops
• Second screen (if needed)
• Ecoflow River Pro UPS (if needed)
• Salary range: R40,000 - R50,000 CTC negotiable