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

About the Role

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.

Primary Responsibilities (~80% of Your Time)

Requirements Development & Developer Coordination

• 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, escalate blockers, and ensure nothing falls through the cracks between vendor teams.

Bug Triage & Issue Management

• 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.

Documentation & Training

• 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.

Stakeholder Communication

• 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.

Technical Value-Add (~20% of Your Time)

While the above responsibilities are the core of the role, we value technical depth that enables better decision-making, smarter questions, and stronger oversight of development teams. These are the technical competencies that will make you most effective:

Database & Application Architecture Awareness

• Understand relational database design (PostgreSQL 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/GraphQL) 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.

AI & Automation Awareness

• 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 possible and drive the right people to build it.

Infrastructure & Tooling Familiarity

• General understanding of Nginx, CI/CD pipelines, and deployment workflows-enough to coordinate with DevOps and understand the release process.


• Comfort with Git-based workflows and code review processes (reviewing for logic and completeness, not necessarily writing production code).

Required Qualifications

• 4-7+ years of experience in a role combining technical project management with application or data engineering in a web application environment.


• Demonstrated ability to manage outsourced or distributed development teams, including vendor coordination, timeline management, and quality oversight.


• Strong technical literacy in SQL, web application architecture (PHP/Laravel and/or similar frameworks), and database fundamentals.


• Proven experience translating business requirements into technical specifications that development teams can execute.


• Excellent written and verbal communication skills; ability to write clear documentation, developer instructions, and stakeholder updates.


• Experience with issue tracking, project management tools, and structured development workflows (Agile, Kanban, or similar).


• Comfortable operating as the "single owner" of a product area without direct reports-influencing through clarity, accountability, and relationships rather than authority.

Nice-to-Have

• Hands-on DBA experience (PostgreSQL, MySQL) including performance tuning, backup/DR, and security administration.


• Experience with CRM platforms (custom-built or commercial) and customer data models.


• Background in implementing or evaluating AI/ML solutions for business applications.


• Scripting ability (Python, PHP, or JavaScript) for automation, data validation, or lightweight tooling.


• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS) and monitoring/alerting tools.


• Prior experience managing budgets or vendor contracts for development services.

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, national origin, age, ancestry, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, disability, medical condition, genetic information, pregnancy, or military or veteran status. We consider all qualified applicants, including those with criminal histories, in a manner consistent with state and local laws, including the California Fair Chance Act, City of Los Angeles' Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, and Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance.