About This Role
We're hiring a Senior IT Project Manager to run technology programme delivery across multiple countries and a growing team. This is a hands-on role that covers everything from client-facing programme governance to the day-to-day realities of managing people: tracking progress, handling leave requests, running performance reviews, and making sure your team has what they need to do good work.
Based at our Istanbul HQ. Hybrid: two days at the office, three days remote. Significant international travel required.
About Beakwise
Beakwise builds a digitalization suite for enterprises, with components specialized for various domains, use cases, and industries. We operate across Turkey, the EU, North Africa, and Central Asia. Our Istanbul HQ is where strategy and product decisions happen. Our Tashkent hub is where a founding engineering team is building the next generation of the platform.
We're growing and hiring across multiple countries. We need someone who can hold delivery and people management together without pretending either part is easy.
Required Qualifications
Experience:
You've spent 5-10 years managing IT projects or programmes, and a meaningful chunk of that was inside financial services: banking, insurance, payments, or fintech. You know what it's like to deliver software where regulators are watching, where downtime costs real money, and where "good enough" isn't.
You've run at least two or three programmes that you'd describe as complex. Not just big, complex. Multiple teams, multiple countries, conflicting priorities, hard deadlines. You've shipped them. You can tell us what went wrong along the way and what you did about it.
People management:
You've managed people before, not just projects. You've handled performance reviews, set individual goals, had difficult feedback conversations, and dealt with leave planning across a team. You understand that good people management is mostly unglamorous admin done consistently well.
Technical understanding:
You're not an engineer, and we won't ask you to write code. But you need to hold your own in a technical conversation. If someone says "we need to refactor the payment reconciliation service before we can add the new endpoint," you should understand roughly what that means and why it might take longer than the client expects.
Familiarity with modern development practices helps: Agile, CI/CD, cloud infrastructure (AWS or Azure), API-driven architectures. You don't need to configure a Kubernetes cluster, but you shouldn't look blank when someone mentions one.
You've used project tools like JIRA, Confluence, or Azure DevOps. You probably have opinions about which one is least annoying.
Communication:
Professional English, written and spoken, is a hard requirement. You'll write proposals, run client calls in English, and send executive summaries to people who care about every word. This isn't "conversational English." This is "draft a change-request justification that a London-based compliance officer will approve" English.
Beyond English, we'd love it if you speak another language we work in. German, French, Spanish, or Dutch would open doors with EU clients. Russian would help with our Central Asian operations. Arabic would strengthen our North Africa presence. None of these are required, but any one of them is a genuine advantage.
Travel and logistics:
Valid passport. Willingness to travel internationally 30-40% of the time, sometimes on short notice. If you've worked across time zones before, you already know the drill. If you haven't, just know that it's tiring and rewarding in roughly equal measure.
Certifications (nice to have, not required):
PMP, PRINCE2, or SAFe certification. We care more about what you've actually delivered than what's on a certificate, but if you have one, great.
Experience with regulatory programmes (KYC, AML, PSD2, GDPR) is a strong plus. So is a background in fintech startups where you had to figure things out without a 200-page process manual.
To Apply
Send us:
- Your CV, with enough detail that we can see your delivery track record and people management experience (not just your title history)
- A short note about a programme that tested you and what you learned from it
- Your language skills and rough travel availability
That's it. No cover letter template. No "Dear Hiring Manager." Just tell us why this sounds like your kind of work.
Key Responsibilities
What you'd actually do
The role breaks down into three areas: programme delivery, people management, and client engagement.
Programme delivery
- Own IT programmes end-to-end: scope, budget, timeline, quality
- Manage distributed teams across EU countries, Africa, the GCC, and Central Asia
- Ensure the Istanbul team, the Tashkent team, and the client's team are all building the same thing
- Expect 30–40% of your time on the road
People management
- Manage a team directly: mentoring, unblocking, setting direction
- Handle leave approvals, individual progress tracking against goals, performance reviews
- Flag underperformance early and keep HR paperwork current
- Take the administrative side seriously — not as an afterthought
Client engagement
- Be the primary delivery contact for clients
- Lead steering committee presentations, risk escalations, scope negotiations
- Sit between business and engineering internally
- Explain technical constraints to product owners and business stakeholders
What We Offer
What we offer
- A salary and benefits package that reflects 5–10 years of financial services experience (we'll discuss numbers early in the process, not at the end)
- Travel allowance and per diem for all business travel
- Real ownership of programme outcomes and a team to manage
- A growing company where your input actually changes how things are done
- Hybrid schedule when you're in Istanbul: two days at the office, three days remote. No debates about which days, you pick
- A team that argues about the right way to do things and then goes for lunch together
A few things worth mentioning
- We're still building our processes — if you want to shape how a growing company works, that's what we're offering
- The travel is real: roughly a third of your working time away from Istanbul, visiting clients, partners, and our Tashkent hub
- The admin work is real too: progress reports, resource allocation, leave calendars, quarterly performance check-ins
Ready?
Send us your CV and a short note about a programme you ran that was genuinely hard, not just large. We want to hear about the problems, not just the outcomes.
We read every application. A real person will get back to you within two weeks.