[Hiring] Delivery Director @J.D. Power

Role Description

The Delivery Director is the senior leader accountable for the successful planning, execution, and completion of client engagements across one or more JD Power OEM programs. Working alongside client stakeholders and internal account teams, you provide strategic direction, leadership, and hands-on guidance to delivery teams, ensuring every project lands on time, within budget, and to the highest quality standards.

This is a dual-mandate role. You are the primary point of contact for stakeholders, keeping them informed of progress and managing their expectations, and you lead the project managers and delivery professionals who execute the work, owning governance, budgets, risk, and quality across a portfolio of concurrent engagements.

Your work determines whether JD Power delivers what it promised, on schedule and within budget, across a portfolio of concurrent OEM engagements. By setting clear governance, holding teams to rigorous quality and financial standards, and surfacing risk before it becomes a client issue, you make delivery predictable and repeatable. Strong performance in this role protects revenue and margin, strengthens client confidence in our ability to execute, and builds a bench of capable project managers and delivery leaders.

In this role, you will be responsible for:

• Strategic Planning & Intake
  • Requirements Gathering: Lead initial client meetings, stakeholder interviews, and requirement sessions to understand project needs, goals, constraints, and success criteria.
  • Scope & Plan Definition: Work with project managers to define scope, objectives, deliverables, milestones, timelines, resource requirements, and budget, and review and approve the resulting project plans, including work breakdown structures and dependencies.
  • Governance Structure: Establish project governance, team roles and responsibilities, communication strategy, quality standards, and documentation requirements for each engagement.
  • Strategic Alignment: Align project plans with client and organizational priorities, and anticipate changes to scope, schedule, or budget before they become problems.
• Program Delivery & Execution
  • Execution Leadership: Implement delivery methodologies, direct project teams, and monitor progress against the baseline plan, taking corrective action when deviations arise.
  • Resource Allocation: Allocate personnel, technology, and vendor resources effectively so that tasks are completed on time and within budget.
  • Methodology Compliance: Ensure adherence to delivery standards and best practices, and track project metrics, performance indicators, and lessons learned to drive continuous improvement.
  • Reporting & Documentation: Deliver regular status reports covering progress, KPIs, milestones, risks, issues, and decisions, and keep plans, schedules, and budgets updated.
• Quality, Risk & Financial Management
  • Quality Assurance: Set quality expectations for each engagement, work with the QE team to confirm those standards are met before deliverables reach the client, and step in when quality issues arise.
  • Risk Management: Ensure project managers identify, assess, and mitigate risks, review the risk picture across your engagements on a regular basis, and communicate significant risks to stakeholders and leadership.
  • Budget Management: Oversee budgets across your engagements, monitor revenue and margin against plan, review forecasts from project managers, and act early on variances or overrun risk.
  • Continuous Improvement: Identify opportunities to improve cost, efficiency, and delivery processes across your portfolio, and share lessons learned across teams.
• Stakeholder Management & Communication
  • Stakeholder Engagement: Identify clients, sponsors, vendors, and other affected parties, understand their priorities, and build positive relationships through regular, transparent communication.
  • Expectation Management: Set realistic goals, timelines, and deliverables, solicit stakeholder feedback, and address concerns proactively.
  • Negotiation: Negotiate scope changes, deliverables, and priorities to resolve conflicts and reach agreements that protect project success.
  • Executive Communication: Facilitate internal and client meetings that drive toward a decision, solution, or clear next step, and communicate the big picture whenever project parameters change.
  • Risk & Escalation: Raise issues with internal leadership and sales early, and escalate in a timely and tactful manner.
• Team Leadership & Development
  • Vision & Accountability: Set clear goals for the team and define roles and responsibilities so every member understands their contribution to the project.
  • People Leadership: Lead, coach, and mentor project managers and delivery professionals, including remote team members, through regular one-on-ones, constructive feedback, and performance management.
  • Team Culture: Foster collaboration, trust, and ownership, empower team members to make decisions, resolve conflict constructively, and recognize achievements.

Qualifications

• Education: Bachelor’s degree required in business administration, project management, engineering, information technology, or a related discipline.
• Experience: 7+ years of project or program delivery experience leading complex, multi-workstream engagements from initiation through completion, with a track record of on-time, on-budget delivery.
• Industry Knowledge: Automotive industry experience preferred, including work with OEMs or with an agency or solution provider serving OEMs.
• Leadership: Demonstrated success leading and developing multidisciplinary teams, including remote team members, and inspiring accountability and high performance.
• Delivery & Technical Literacy: Working knowledge of the software development lifecycle (Waterfall, Agile, DevOps, CI/CD) and a general understanding of IT infrastructure, cloud platforms, cybersecurity, and data analytics sufficient to engage credibly with technical teams.
• Tools: Proficiency with project management tools such as Microsoft Project, Jira, Asana, or similar.
• Financial & Risk Acumen: Strong command of budgeting, forecasting, and cost control, with proven risk management skills.
• Strategic Acumen: Ability to align project objectives with business goals, assess business impact and ROI, and plan for change management across stakeholder groups.
• Communication & Negotiation: Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with confidence presenting to senior audiences and negotiating scope, priorities, and deliverables.
• Problem Solving & Resilience: Sound decision-making in ambiguity, adaptability as circumstances change, and a commitment to continuous learning.
• Travel: Willingness to travel to client locations as program needs require.

Preferred Qualifications

• Certifications: PMP, PRINCE2 Practitioner, Certified ScrumMaster, or PMI-ACP preferred.

Compensation and Benefits

• This position has a starting salary range of CAD $125,000-$136,000 / USD $160,000-$175,000 per year.
• Eligible employees may participate in medical, dental, vision, disability, life insurance, retirement savings programs, paid time off, wellness programs, and other company-sponsored benefits.

Company Description

JD Power powers auto-related decisions through proprietary data, advanced analytics, deep industry expertise, and workflows that connect insight to action. Operating across North America, Europe, and Australia, we help customers make better decisions and achieve better outcomes.

• As a virtual-first company, we offer flexible work arrangements, opportunities for learning and development, and a culture centered on the Values that guide how we work every day.
• We power our customers’ success.
• We are innovative, collaborative, and grounded in data.
• We make things easy.
• We get it done.
• We start with trust and prove it every day.