[Hiring] Engineering Delivery Manager @Progress Partners

Role Description

Hi I'm Thomas, CTO at Progress Partners. I'm hiring an Engineering Delivery Manager to strengthen delivery predictability, quality, and visibility across our external engineering teams. This is a strategic, company-side delivery role, not a traditional line-management role. You won't manage engineers directly; instead, you'll work with lead-level stakeholders across several teams to understand how work actually gets planned and delivered, surface risks and bottlenecks early, and drive measurable improvement. You'll partner closely with external engineering and vendor leads, product managers, technical leads, QA, platform engineering, and business stakeholders, with real ownership over how we deliver and the freedom to change it for the better.

What You’ll Do

• Build clear visibility into what each external team is working on, who owns what, and where delivery risk sits.
• Ensure delivery plans are realistic, transparent, and tied to business priorities — and track progress against them.
• Spot teams falling behind early, not after deadlines slip, and diagnose root causes (estimation, scope, capacity, ownership, quality, or dependencies).
• Challenge weak plans, unrealistic estimates, unclear ownership, and superficial status reporting.
• Validate that reported progress reflects real engineering output.
• Improve planning and forecasting discipline, moving teams from optimistic plans to evidence-based delivery.
• Work with QA and engineering leads to make quality visible as part of delivery — tracking escaped bugs, rework, and release readiness, and supporting consistent Definition of Ready / Definition of Done and quality gates.
• Track cross-team dependencies, ensure blockers are owned and resolved, and run clear, fact-based escalation paths.
• Build a clear understanding of each external team’s composition, role coverage, seniority mix, ownership areas, and capability gaps.
• Identify where delivery or quality issues are caused by team setup, missing ownership, skill gaps, low allocation, weak technical leadership, or unclear requirements.
• Ensure external teams follow agreed company delivery rules, documentation expectations, engineering standards, quality gates, and reporting practices.
• Build vendor/team delivery scorecards covering predictability, quality, responsiveness, planning accuracy, delivery reliability, and escalation patterns.
• Create fact-based escalation paths when external teams repeatedly miss commitments, provide weak delivery evidence, or fall below agreed quality expectations.
• Communicate delivery status, risks, and trade-offs clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders, translating delivery issues into business impact.

Qualifications

• 7+ years in software delivery, technical/engineering delivery management, technical program management, or engineering leadership.
• Proven experience managing delivery across multiple external teams, vendors, or distributed partners.
• Experience overseeing delivery across engineering teams, vendors, or delivery groups of roughly 20–35 people.
• Exposure to a few different business models or product environments (rather than narrow specialization) is a strong plus.
• Strong grasp of software development lifecycles, agile delivery, estimation, release planning, QA workflows, and engineering team dynamics.
• Ability to build delivery reporting and analysis, and to read teams accurately — including spotting gaps hidden behind tidy reporting.
• Strong delivery metrics fluency: planned vs. actual, cycle time, throughput, escaped bugs, rework, blocked work, and predictability.
• Risk and dependency management.
• Excellent communication with both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Hands-on with delivery and engineering tools such as Jira, GitHub, Confluence, Linear, or Azure DevOps.

Nice to Have

• Experience in multi-product SaaS environments and companies dependent on external engineering partners.
• Experience building vendor scorecards or delivery performance frameworks.
• Experience introducing the Definition of Ready/Done, release checklists, or quality gates.

What We Offer

• Remote-first: work from anywhere in the world, no relocation required.
• Flexible hours: we measure outcomes, not time at a desk.
• Unlimited PTO: take the time you need to rest, recharge, and do your best work.
• Learning & development budget: courses, books, conferences, certifications, whatever helps you grow.
• Home office & wellness allowance: a dedicated budget to set up your workspace and support your health.
• A small, senior, collaborative team where your work is visible and your decisions matter.
• The chance to build products used by millions of people across 160+ countries.

Equal Opportunity

Progress Partners is an equal opportunity employer, and we’re serious about building a diverse, inclusive team. We welcome applications from people of all genders, gender identities and expressions, sexual orientations, ages, ethnicities, nationalities, religions, disabilities, neurotypes, family situations, socioeconomic backgrounds, and life experiences.

We hire on skills, experience, potential, and values fit, never on protected characteristics. If you need accommodations during the application or interview process, just let us know.