CRM Application Manager

We are hiring a CRM Application Manager to start immediately for an investment firm in Newport Beach.

• This is a Direct Hire position, around 110k to 120k/year with potential company bonus
• 100% on site to start but can turn into hybrid schedule later on

We're looking for a CRM Application Manager to serve as the central owner of our custom CRM platform built on PHP/Laravel and React. This is a hands‑on leadership role: you'll sit between our business users and our outsourced development teams (2–3 vendor firms), translating business needs into clear technical requirements, managing developer priorities and timelines, and ensuring our applications evolve to meet the organization's needs.

This is not a traditional Database Administrator or software engineering role. While technical fluency is essential—you need to understand database design, application architecture, and modern web technologies well enough to make smart decisions and ask the right questions—your primary value is in project leadership, requirements translation, vendor coordination, and driving results across teams you don't directly manage.

• Meet with internal business users and stakeholders to understand application needs, pain points, and feature requests.
• Translate business requirements into clear, detailed technical specifications and developer instructions that outsourced teams can execute against.
• Manage and prioritize the development backlog across 2–3 external development firms, ensuring alignment on scope, timelines, and deliverables.
• Review developer work product for completeness, quality, and alignment with requirements—not necessarily writing code but understanding it well enough to evaluate what's delivered.
• Serve as the single point of accountability for CRM application delivery; own the timeline, elevate blockers, and ensure nothing falls through the cracks between vendor teams.

• Identify, document, and prioritize bug fixes; communicate urgency and business impact to development teams.
• Establish and maintain a structured process for issue tracking, resolution, and verification across vendor teams.
• Coordinate testing and QA efforts to ensure fixes are validated before production deployment.

• Write and maintain internal documentation including user guides, training materials, and system documentation for CRM applications.
• Communicate planned upgrades, feature releases, and process changes to end users and stakeholders.
• Develop onboarding materials for new users and maintain a knowledge base for common workflows and troubleshooting.

• Provide regular status updates to leadership on development progress, timelines, and any risks or trade‑offs.
• Facilitate alignment between business stakeholders and development teams on priorities and scope decisions.
• Build and maintain productive working relationships with vendor development leads; hold vendors accountable for commitments.

• Understand relational database design (Postgre
  
  SQL preferred) well enough to evaluate schema proposals, identify performance concerns, and have informed conversations with developers about data modeling.
• Familiarity with PHP/Laravel application patterns (Eloquent ORM, migrations, queues) and React front‑end data access (REST/Graph
  
  QL) so you can review architectural decisions and spot potential issues.
• Awareness of database operations fundamentals: backup/recovery, indexing strategies, query performance, and security best practices.

• Ability to identify practical AI use cases within CRM workflows (e.g., automated email drafting, lead scoring, ticket categorization, call summary ingestion) and translate them into actionable requirements for developers or vendor evaluations.
• Understand enough about AI integration patterns to evaluate vendor proposals and ask the right questions about data privacy, compliance, and performance.
• You don't need to build AI pipelines—you need to know what's…