[Hiring] Team Lead, Delivery Management @Element451

Role Description

Element451 is building the AI-powered platform reshaping how colleges and universities recruit, enroll, and support their students - and delivery is how that platform reaches the institutions that run on it. This is a rare chance to lead a focused engineering team and still keep your hands in the work: own the delivery, build and grow the people, and stay close enough to the code to make real technical calls. If you became a leader because you love building and you don’t want to stop - you’ll feel at home here.

You’ll lead one of our delivery teams - Bolt or CRM and own what it ships. You’ll manage a team of up to eight engineers and be accountable for its delivery end to end: velocity, predictability, and quality, from planning until working software is live in production. This is deliberately a Team Lead role, not a hands-off manager role. It’s a player-coach job that flexes with team size:

• While the team is small, you’re expected to be genuinely hands-on — engaging in technical challenges, reviewing PRs, and joining incident response.
• As the team grows toward full size, that hands-on share shifts toward leadership.

The role reports into senior engineering leadership and sits a level below our Director, Engineering scope, with real ownership of a single team rather than a department.

It’s also an explicitly AI-forward role. We expect you to use AI aggressively and intelligently across the full development lifecycle, to drive that behavior on your team, and to hold AI-assisted work to the same bar as anything written by hand. This is a remote role based in Serbia.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of professional software engineering in a complex, multi-tenant SaaS product, including meaningful hands-on technical work.
• 1+ years leading engineers — as a manager, tech lead, or team lead. This can be your first formal management role, but you’ve owned outcomes through other people before.
• Enough technical depth in our stack — PHP/Laravel, TypeScript (NestJS/Angular), MongoDB, AWS — to engage substantively in architecture discussions, review PRs, and make sound trade-off calls.
• A track record of delivering — owning velocity, predictability, and quality for a team or significant scope, all the way through to production.
• Comfort operating within a cycle-based product development methodology; familiarity with Shape Up or a comparable approach is a plus.
• A genuine commitment to building an AI-forward team. We’re a Cursor shop; Claude Code, Codex, or comparable tools are equally valued.
• Strong communication at both the engineering-detail and leadership-summary levels — effective in 1:1s, team retrospectives, and leadership reviews alike.

Requirements

• Own your team’s delivery outcomes - not just that work gets written, but that it gets shipped, stays healthy, and the people doing it keep getting better.
• Product owns problem prioritization and desired outcomes. The Team Lead owns team capacity, delivery commitments, execution, and release readiness.
• Own your team’s delivery end to end — velocity, predictability, and quality — from cycle planning until working software is in production, not merged or sitting in staging.
• Lead, coach, and grow a team of three to eight engineers — regular 1:1s, actionable feedback, honest career development, hiring, and addressing underperformance early and directly.
• Own team-level cycle shaping and planning — size and scope work to a deliverable cycle boundary, ground commitments in honest engineering analysis, and represent your team’s capacity and constraints to Product before anything is agreed to.
• Stay hands-on where it counts, especially while the team is small — engage in technical challenges, review PRs on high-risk and high-signal work, and join incident response.
• Reinforce the technical standards owned by your senior and principal engineers — hold the team accountable to code quality, review thoroughness, testing, and sound architecture.
• Own release health for your team — “done” means in production. Drive completed work to release and remove the organizational and process blockers that delay deployment.
• Own the engineering–QA contract for your team — when QA engages in the cycle, what a ready handoff from engineering looks like, and what quality gates must clear before a release.
• Drive AI adoption as a delivery lever — continuously find where AI can remove constraints across the SDLC, pilot tooling, and measure impact against delivery outcomes.
• Partner across Product, Design, and the rest of Engineering — surface delivery status, risk, and resourcing needs early and credibly.

Benefits

• Impactful not Immediate - We prioritize and invest in initiatives that will be most impactful.
• Progress before Perfection - We are action-oriented people. We are empowered to make decisions and achieve our goals.
• Learners before Masters - We are curious and humble people who strive to constantly improve.
• Together not Alone - We rally behind each other and pitch in to support the greater whole.
• Customer Success not Support - We solve partner goals and prioritize their success.

Company Description

Our process is rigorous and designed to be a real signal — for you and for us. Expect live, interactive technical and leadership assessment with our engineers and leaders, not take-home busywork or trivia. You’ll show how you think about delivery, how you lead and grow a team, how you stay hands-on, and how you apply AI tooling in real time. We move quickly for the right people and give you a clear view of the bar before you accept.