The Opportunity

Located in Toronto’s design district near King & Spadina, Cortex Design is a full-service product development firm specializing in the design and engineering of technically complex medtech products.

We’re growing, our client portfolio is expanding, and the projects coming through the studio are becoming larger and more complex. We’re adding a Project Manager who can take real ownership of product-development programs from early planning and quoting through execution and delivery.

This is broader than a traditional PM role. You’ll lead projects, own the client relationship, manage scope and budget from Cortex’s perspective, coordinate multidisciplinary teams, and help shape the next phase of work. You’ll need to understand enough about how products get designed, engineered, prototyped, tested, and manufactured to ask good questions, recognize when something doesn’t add up, and bring the right people into the conversation.

You do not need medical-device experience. You do need product-development experience. We’re looking for someone who has worked around products that moved through industrial design, engineering, software, prototyping, manufacturing, or some combination of those disciplines. If your experience is exclusively in construction, buildings, infrastructure, or another environment without a product-development process, this role is unlikely to be the right fit.

As our project portfolio grows, this role will also take on more responsibility during quoting. You’ll help make sure each proposed phase reflects what the team actually needs to deliver the work, update project quotes as phases close, and surface opportunities where Cortex can create additional value for the client.

We expect this role to land around 2–5 years of relevant project management experience, although we care more about what you’ve actually owned than a precise year count.

Salary: $80,000–$95,000 CAD

Work model: Approximately 70% in our Toronto studio / 30% work from home, with flexibility around when you use your WFH time

Benefits: Extended health and dental, profit sharing, and three weeks of vacation

What are WE Like?

We’re not your average medtech consultancy.

Cortex is an ISO 13485-certified, design-led firm that lives at the intersection of human-centred design and engineering excellence. We exist to create beautiful, life-changing experiences that substantially improve human quality of life.

We’ve helped clients develop award-winning, emotionally resonant products that span healthcare and consumer markets—and we’re just getting started. Our team is multidisciplinary, collaborative, fast-moving, and deeply invested in client success.

We’re also the only Canadian team ever to win an XPRIZE, and we take pride in blending artistry with technical rigour.

Clients come to us because they want products that are intuitive, beautiful, and engineered with discipline. Our downtown studio houses everything from early research and prototyping to precision assembly, giving us the ability to move fast and deliver with confidence.

If you want an inside look at how we think and work, check out our website, follow us on LinkedIn, or explore our blog.

What You’ll Do

You’ll own the operating rhythm of several complex product-development projects at once. That means keeping the client, technical leads, internal teams, scope, schedule, and budget moving in the same direction—not simply maintaining a project plan.

You will:

- Lead projects from definition through delivery. Build plans that make the work understandable and executable, establish meaningful milestones, manage dependencies across disciplines,



and keep teams focused on the decisions and deliverables that move the product forward.
- Own the client relationship day-to-day. Become the person clients trust for clarity on where the project stands, what comes next, where decisions are needed, and what may affect scope, timing, or budget.
- Protect the scope and economics of the work. Understand what Cortex sold, track how the project is performing against that commitment, and raise issues before they become overruns. When requirements change, or technical realities shift, help the team and client make deliberate trade-offs.
- Strengthen project quoting. Work with technical leads, department heads, and Sales to make sure the next phase reflects the work required. Update quotes as phases conclude, test whether proposed budgets are realistic, and surface potential follow-on opportunities.
- Create alignment across disciplines. Work with industrial designers, design engineers, embedded system developers, systems engineers, and other contributors. You do not need to be the technical expert in every room, but you need enough fluency to know what questions to ask and who needs to answer them.
- Manage risk actively. Identify emerging technical, commercial, resourcing, and schedule risks early. Bring options rather than simply reporting problems, and drive the decisions needed to keep work moving.
- Give the team and leadership a clear view of project health. Maintain accurate schedules, resource plans, forecasts, and project metrics so Cortex can make good decisions about staffing, priorities, budgets, and commitments.
- Improve how the work runs. Use Wrike and our internal systems with discipline, and look for opportunities to make reporting, coordination, and project operations clearer and more efficient.

The internal role definition emphasizes full-cycle delivery, client management, cross-functional resource planning, project health, scope and risk management, quoting support, and delivery within budget and timeline.

What We’re Looking For

Foundational Requirements

You have hands-on experience working within a product-development setting. You understand, at a practical level, how an idea moves toward a real product through some combination of design, engineering, software, prototyping, testing, manufacturing, and launch.

You should also bring:

- Roughly 2–5 years of project management or closely related experience
- Experience seeing projects through meaningful portions of a development cycle rather than only managing isolated tasks
- Strong client-management instincts and the judgment to handle difficult conversations clearly and constructively
- The ability to manage scope, schedule, budget, resources, risks, and competing priorities at the same time
- Enough technical curiosity to follow conversations outside your own expertise, ask useful questions, and recognize when you need another perspective
- Strong analytical judgment and close attention to detail
- Clear written and verbal communication
- Resourcefulness when the obvious plan stops working
- Comfort operating in a small team where the person who spots a problem often helps solve it

Preferred Competencies

These will help, but we do not expect every candidate to have all of them:

- Experience developing medical devices or other regulated products
- Experience with industrial design,



mechanical engineering, electronics, software development, prototyping, or manufacturing processes
- Experience contributing to a physical product that reached manufacturing or market
- Familiarity with Wrike
- PMP certification
- A degree related to product development, engineering, computer science, business, or another relevant field

Advanced Competencies

Strong candidates will have experience with several of the following:

- Managing multidisciplinary teams across design, engineering, hardware, firmware/ software, and manufacturing
- Building or reviewing project estimates and translating technical plans into realistic budgets
- Managing commercial scope alongside technical delivery
- Identifying follow-on work or unmet client needs and bringing those opportunities into the sales process
- Managing multiple active client projects with different timelines, teams, and levels of complexity
- Using project data to improve forecasting, resource planning, or operational decision-making
- Understanding how startups operate, including how product-development milestones can tie directly to fundraising, runway, and investor expectations.

How We Work

At Cortex, PMs aren’t here to relay updates between a client and a technical team. You’re expected to stay close enough to the work to understand what the client is trying to achieve, what the team needs to deliver it, and what the project can support in scope, budget, and timeline.

Product development is rarely linear. Requirements change, prototypes uncover new information, and priorities shift. Your job is to surface those changes early, get the right people involved, make the trade-offs clear, and keep the project moving.

We expect ownership. If you see a risk, raise it early. If the budget no longer matches the work, address it. If there’s an opportunity to expand the engagement, bring it forward. If something isn’t working, help fix it—not just document it.

Show Us What You’ve Done

We’re more interested in evidence than adjectives.

Tell us about projects you’ve actually helped lead: what was being developed, where you entered the process, what you owned, what became difficult, how you worked with the client and technical team, and what happened as a result.

We’re particularly interested in examples where you:

- Managed a product through multiple stages of development
- Kept a project commercially healthy while requirements or technical realities changed
- Coordinated people with very different areas of expertise
- Navigated a difficult client or stakeholder conversation
- Improved the way a project, system, or team operated
- Recognized an opportunity beyond the original scope and helped turn it into practical additional work

You do not need a polished portfolio. We do want enough substance to understand how you operate when the project becomes complicated.

Closing

If you want a PM role where success means more than keeping meetings organized and tasks updated, we’d like to hear from you.

This role gives you meaningful ownership of the client relationship, the commercial health of the work, and the way multidisciplinary teams turn complex ideas into real products. It also expects you to notice problems early, ask informed questions, make sound calls with imperfect information, and follow through.

If that sounds like the kind of responsibility you want, apply and show us what you’ve already done.

Pay: $80,000.00-$95,000.00 per year

Benefits:

- Casual dress
- Company events
- Dental care
- Extended health care
- Flexible schedule
- Paid time off
- Profit sharing
- Vision care
- Work from home

Work Location: Hybrid remote in Toronto, ON M5V 2G5

📌 Project Manager | Product Development (Toronto)
🏢 Cortex Design
📍 Toronto