Senior Project Manager

The Senior Project Manager provides project leadership and coordination for Zinc projects. The post-holder is responsible for managing day-to-day delivery across work streams, maintaining delivery discipline, tracking timelines, budgets, risks, deliverables, compliance, and reporting, and coordinating across internal teams, partners, and clients to ensure activities are delivered to a high standard, on time, and within budget. The Senior Project Manager represents Zinc professionally in client meetings and partner engagements, contributes credible technical and delivery insight, and escalates strategic, contractual, commercial, or high-stakes issues to the Project Director or designated programme lead with clear recommendations.

You must currently hold active UK Government Security Check (SC) Clearance.

• Manage and coordinate the day-to-day delivery of project activities, translating strategic and client requirements into practical workplans, activity trackers, and deliverable schedules, and ensuring alignment with programme strategy, deadlines, budget, and quality standards.

• Oversee project timelines, milestones, budgets, and deliverables, tracking progress and ensuring internal, client, and donor requirements are met.

• Lead regular client and donor reporting, including quarterly and annual reports, collating evidence of results, risks, adaptation, and learning for internal reviews and client-facing updates, in coordination with MEL and other teams.

• Maintain project documentation and compliance records, including deliverables, decision logs, risk trackers, partner records, approvals, and evidence of progress, ensuring lessons learned are properly captured.

• Support quality assurance of client-facing reports, deliverables, and communications before senior review and sign-off, ensuring accuracy, consistency, and delivery quality.

• Manage day-to-day client, partner, and stakeholder engagement, ensuring clarity on responsibilities, expectations, deadlines, deliverables, and follow-up actions.

• Act as a key point of contact for project logistics and coordination with partners and internal teams.

• Represent Zinc professionally in client meetings and partner engagements, building trusted operational relationships and escalating strategic or high-risk matters to the Project Director.

• Prepare briefs, meeting notes, and follow-up materials for client, partner, and high-level stakeholder engagements.

• Ensure external engagement reflects Zinc Network's values and sustains client and partner confidence through disciplined delivery, responsive coordination, and professional representation, reinforcing Zinc's reputation for quality, integrity, and responsible delivery.

• Track project budgets and financial information in coordination with the Project Director, finance, and operations colleagues, helping ensure activities remain within agreed budgets.

• Support operations team members in procurement, contracting partner logistics, travel arrangements, and other operational processes in line with Zinc and donor requirements.

• Identify safeguarding, security, or reputational risks early and propose practical mitigations, integrating them into project risk management processes.

• Understand the commercial and contractual requirements governing each project, including scope, deliverables, invoicing, procurement, and wider compliance.

• Escalate material budget, compliance, procurement, partner-performance, or delivery issues to the Project Director with clear evidence and recommended next steps.

• Coordinate the day-to-day work of multidisciplinary project teams and external partners, ensuring colleagues understand priorities, responsibilities, deadlines, and dependencies.

• Enable effective collaboration between researchers, analysts, strategists, creatives, MEL specialists, operations staff, technical specialists, and regional partners.

• Provide task guidance, coaching, and quality feedback to junior project staff or partner focal points where assigned.

• Identify resourcing pressures, workload risks, performance concerns, or coordination barriers and elevate them to the Project Director with proposed solutions.

• Contribute to written strategy documents, research reports, project updates, and other programme documentation as required.

• Provide operational…