Senior Project Manager – Banking & Financial Services

ArcOne AI is seeking an experienced project manager to lead complex, high-visibility initiatives for large financial institutions. The role owns project planning and execution end to end, manages risks and governance, coordinates cross-functional banking stakeholders and vendors, and provides credible reporting to executives and steering committees.

Responsibilities:

• Own the project plan. Partner with business, technology, and vendor teams to build, maintain, and continuously update detailed project plans in Microsoft Project, including scope, milestones, dependencies, resource assignments, and critical path
• Drive execution. Track progress against baseline, manage schedule variance, and hold cross-functional teams accountable to committed dates and deliverables
• Manage risk proactively. Maintain the RAID log (risks, actions, issues, decisions), quantify impact, develop mitigation and contingency plans, and drive risks to closure rather than simply reporting them
• De-risk the delivery. Anticipate downstream challenges within the plan — resource constraints, vendor dependencies, conversion windows, regulatory checkpoints — and restructure sequencing or scope to protect the timeline
• Report with credibility. Produce and deliver executive-level status updates, dashboards, and steering committee materials that are concise, accurate, and decision-oriented
• Engage executives. Present to and interact directly with senior bank leadership, including C-suite and steering committee members. Field difficult questions, deliver bad news early and constructively, and drive decisions to resolution
• Coordinate stakeholders. Serve as the central point of coordination across retail banking, commercial banking, operations, IT, compliance, risk, and third-party vendors
• Manage governance. Run structured project cadences — status meetings, working sessions, change control, and steering committee reviews — with clear agendas, decisions, and follow-through

Requirements:

• 5+ years of project management experience delivering complex projects, with a substantial portion in banking or financial services
• Demonstrated experience running projects for large financial institutions, with direct accountability for schedule, scope, and executive reporting
• Working knowledge of core banking systems and the ability to speak credibly about core platforms and their downstream integrations. Familiarity with major cores is required — for example: FIS (IBS, HORIZON, Systematics), Fiserv (DNA, Premier, Signature, Precision), Jack Henry (SilverLake, CIF 20/20, Core Director, Symitar), Temenos, Finxact, or comparable platforms
• Banking domain knowledge across both retail and commercial lines of business, including deposits, lending, treasury management, payments, online/mobile banking, and back-office operations
• Advanced proficiency in Microsoft Project — building schedules from scratch, managing dependencies and critical path, baselining, and reporting on variance
• Proven executive presence. Comfortable presenting to and being challenged by senior executives and steering committees
• Excellent written and verbal communication, with the ability to translate technical detail into business impact for a non-technical audience
• Must be located in the United States and authorized to work in the U.S. without sponsorship
• Located in Wisconsin or willing to work remotely
• Experience leading a core conversion, core upgrade, or system migration for a bank
• Experience with integrations
• PMP, PgMP, or equivalent certification; Agile/Scrum certification a plus
• Experience with project and portfolio management tooling beyond MS Project (Jira, Smartsheet, Planview, ServiceNow, Clarity)
• Experience managing third-party vendors and holding them to contractual delivery commitments