Senior Project Manager

A leading global airline brand is hiring a dedicated Photography Project Manager to anchor the intake, traffic, and lifecycle of every photo project landing on their in-house Brand Marketing team. This is a full-time, indefinite contract role embedded inside a high-volume creative organization where one person owns the entire photo workflow end-to-end. You are not the photographer, not the producer—you are the operator behind the operation. You are the single point of intake for requests pouring in from departments across the business, and you are the calm in the storm when everything hits at once.

You will partner cross-functionally to scope, schedule, and resource projects, run a daily post-production standup with retouchers and art directors, and steadily rebuild the workflows and SOPs that scale this team going forward. The current lead has been doing this job alongside a Producer role and is being promoted into the Producer seat full time, which means you inherit a running team with a built-in onboarding partner and a clear runway to make the role your own.

You Will:

• Manage all incoming photography project requests through Workfront, ensuring accurate intake, categorization, and prioritization
• Facilitate a daily standup to review project status, surface blockers, assign new requests, and balance workload across the team based on bandwidth, skillset, and priority
• Build and maintain scopes, timelines, and capacity reporting across multiple concurrent projects
• Track team hours, project progress, and risk; proactively flag and mitigate capacity, resourcing, and timeline issues before they escalate
• Build trusted relationships with internal stakeholders across all levels, translating business requirements into clear briefs for the creative team
• Ensure final deliverables meet brand, editorial, and legal compliance standards, including catalog handoff into the DAM
• Evaluate workflows across the photography team and adjacent creative ops functions, identify gaps, and lead the implementation of new processes
• Develop and maintain Standard Operating Procedures that document how the team works and support scalability

You Have:

• 5 years of project management experience inside an in-house creative team, agency creative ops function, or similar high-volume environment
• Advanced Workfront proficiency—project setup, task management, reporting, and workflow configuration (must-have, no substitutes)
• A track record of delivering complex, high-visibility creative projects on time and within scope
• Strong stakeholder and account management skills with the ability to communicate effectively across all levels of a large organization
• Proven ability to prioritize multiple competing projects in a fast-paced, deadline-driven environment
• Exceptional communication, organization, and problem-solving skills with sharp attention to detail
• Familiarity with Digital Asset Management systems and an understanding of asset organization, metadata, and delivery workflows
• Microsoft 365 fluency across SharePoint, Outlook, and Teams
• Nice to Have: experience supporting an in-house creative team at a large consumer brand or enterprise

Logistics:

• Projected Start Date: Target mid-to-late June 2026
• Duration: Indefinite, full-time contract
• Hours/Week: 40
• Onsite/offsite: Hybrid in Chicago. Team is onsite Tuesdays and Thursdays;
• Laptop/Program Requirements: Workfront, Microsoft 365 (SharePoint, Outlook, Teams), DAM platform exposure
• Team Structure: Dedicated Photography Project Manager reporting into the Brand Marketing creative ops function. Partners with the Photo Producer, retouchers, art directors, the lead creative art director, and a Workfront-specialist Project Manager on the broader creative ops team