Sr. Operational Project Manager

The Senior Operational Project Manager owns the operational rhythm of Viral Nation’s agency delivery. Sitting within the PMO and embedded across Client Services, Strategy, Creative & Content, Paid Media, Business Intelligence, and Creator Relations, you ensure multi-client engagements are resourced, on track, and delivering measurable outcomes. You translate strategic business objectives into executable operational plans — managing backlogs, optimizing resource allocation, enforcing delivery cadences, and surfacing risks before they become client-facing problems. The role also flexes into social creative production coordination when volume spikes or cross-functional dependencies demand it, managing content delivery timelines and ensuring assets move from brief to published on schedule.

This is a role for someone with a founder mentality: you see a gap, you fill it. You don’t wait to be told that a workflow is broken or that a delivery is slipping — you step in, solve the problem, and build a system so it doesn’t happen again. We’re looking for someone who is hungry to grow their scope, eager to take on new challenges, and energized by the pace of agency life rather than overwhelmed by it.

You will oversee a portfolio of concurrent operational initiatives and ongoing service delivery across diverse clients, each with unique timelines, team compositions, and delivery cadences. Campaign complexity and resource demands fluctuate throughout the year; the role requires planning for this variability, managing capacity effectively, and making professional judgments regarding scope, resource trade-offs, and process escalations independently. The scope will grow with the right person in the seat.

Responsibilities:

This role is the connective tissue between the PMO and the rest of Viral Nation’s operating system:

• Cross-functional delivery coordination: Partner with Client Services, Strategy, Paid Media, BI, Creator Relations, and COE leads to manage delivery timelines, handoffs, and dependencies across concurrent engagements. When the client asks “where does this stand?” or “are we on track for the quarter?” — that answer is informed by the operational cadence you manage. When campaigns involve creator or UGC content, you coordinate delivery timelines and understand how approval sequences and usage rights windows affect overall campaign delivery.
• Creative production coordination: While a dedicated Creative PM leads day-to-day studio production, you provide operational support for content delivery workflows when volume spikes, new engagements ramp, or cross-functional dependencies require coordination. This includes managing production timelines across social platforms (Instagram Reels, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Stories, carousels, static posts), coordinating revision cycles, tracking multi-format asset delivery, and ensuring creative-to-media and creative-to-client handoffs land on time. You don’t need to be a creative director, but you need to understand how social content moves from brief to published and where bottlenecks typically occur.
• Resource management & capacity planning: Manage resource allocation and utilization across teams and concurrent client engagements, partnering with Creative PMs on production resourcing as needed. Balance workload, flag capacity gaps before they become delivery problems, and build staffing recommendations when demand exceeds supply. When three campaigns are ramping simultaneously or a team’s utilization exceeds 90% for consecutive weeks, you know that’s an escalation trigger.
• Backlog & SLA ownership: Own operational backlogs across departments, tracking task completion against delivery SLAs and reporting cadences. Implement proactive monitoring to ensure backlogs don’t accumulate silently, and build escalation paths for SLA breaches before they become systemic. Track compliance trends over time to identify structural issues versus one-off misses.
• Operational cadence & rhythm of business: Own the PMO Rhythm of Business (RoB) calendar, ensuring your projects are synchronized, prepared, and delivering against shared milestones. Lead structured operational check-ins, WBRs, and cross-functional syncs with clear agendas, action items, and documented outcomes. You are the consistent operational thread that ties the COEs together.
• Budget & scope stewardship: Track operational burn rates against SOW allocations and resourcing plans. Flag scope creep early — additional deliverables, expanded timelines, resource overages, extra revision rounds, or format changes — and build change-order recommendations before they reach the client. Collaborate with Finance on utilization reporting, burn rate tracking, and variance analysis.
• Risk identification & mitigation: Implement tools and workflows to proactively surface operational risks in real time — under-utilization, over-allocation, missed deadlines, dependency bottlenecks, and reporting gaps. You don’t wait for post-mortems to find problems; you build systems that catch them early.
• Process improvement & standardization: Identify recurring friction in agency workflows and propose systemic fixes — process playbooks, workflow automation, briefing standards, project management tool optimization, and approval flow redesigns. Lead retrospectives on major projects to drive continuous improvement in resource optimization and delivery precision.
• Engagement ramp management: New client engagements don’t start at full operational volume. You plan and manage the ramp-up from lower capacity in month one to steady-state delivery, adjusting staffing models, content production cadences, and operational rhythms as the team builds momentum with a new client.
• BI & data hygiene: Ensure data entry standards are enforced across workflows and that reporting cadences are maintained so Business Intelligence can deliver campaign insights on schedule. Accurate, on-time data feeds directly into VN’s reporting infrastructure and client deliverables.
• New business support: Contribute operational scoping, resource models, creative staffing plans, and timeline estimates for pitch responses and RFPs when needed.
• You are comfortable using AI to find efficiencies in your day-to-day work and thrive in a fast-paced environment. This role rewards initiative, and additional responsibilities will come with demonstrated impact.

Skills and Qualifications:

• 7+ years in project management within a marketing, advertising, or agency environment, with significant experience managing multi-client, cross-functional operational workflows. In-house brand experience alone is not sufficient — you’ll need to have managed the complexity of multi-stakeholder agency operations.
• Deep operational and PMO expertise: agency cadences, resource utilization, backlog management, SLA compliance, and the full engagement lifecycle from onboarding through steady-state delivery. You can speak credibly to department leads about capacity, timeline trade-offs, and risk mitigation.
• Familiarity with social-first content production — how assets move from brief through design, editing, revision, approval, and publishing across platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. You don’t need to be a creative producer, but you can manage a content delivery timeline and recognize when a production schedule is at risk.
• Financial acumen: burn tracking, variance reporting, utilization analysis, and scope change management. You understand how operational hours map to project economics and margin.
• Proficiency with project management platforms (e.g., Monday.com, Jira), time tracking tools (e.g., Kantata, Timely), CRM systems (e.g., HubSpot), Google Suite, and Slack. Experience with creative review tools (e.g., Frame.io, Ziflow) and familiarity with design platforms (e.g., Adobe Creative Suite, Figma, CapCut) is a plus.
• Strong cross-functional leadership: demonstrated ability to drive alignment across operations, account, strategy, creative, and delivery teams that don’t report to you. You influence through clarity, preparation, and follow-through — not org chart authority.
• Excellent written and verbal communication: you can write a concise operational brief, give direct feedback on process adherence, run a productive business review, and present delivery status to senior leadership with equal confidence.
• Initiative and ownership mindset: you don’t wait to be asked. When you see a gap — a slipping timeline, an unowned workflow, a broken process — you step in and fix it. You’re energized by growing your scope, not protective of your lane.
• Experience designing and leading WBRs, MBRs, and QBRs in a multi-client agency environment, and building process playbooks, SOPs, or operational runbooks that scale across teams and engagements is preferred.
• PMP, PgMP, or equivalent project management certification is a plus.
• Previous experience at a social-first agency, influencer marketing agency, or digital marketing agency with multi-COE delivery structures is preferred.