Delivery Lead

Engineering Delivery / Agile Lead

Role Overview

Client is seeking an Engineering Delivery / Agile Lead to strengthen execution across a lean, distributed engineering organization. This person will help teams manage day-to-day delivery while also driving several high-priority initiatives that require coordination across Engineering, Product, Data, Platform, QA, Security, Compliance, and business stakeholders.

The role combines Agile delivery leadership, technical program management, Jira discipline, dependency management, risk escalation, and continuous improvement. The right person must be comfortable moving between team-level execution and cross-functional program leadership, creating enough structure to improve predictability without adding unnecessary bureaucracy.

This is not primarily an application development role and it is not a meeting-scheduling role. The ideal candidate has enough technical fluency to work credibly with engineers, understands modern software delivery, and can translate complex work into clear plans, owners, milestones, dependencies, risks, decisions, and outcomes.

Why This Role Matters

•  Client has strong engineers and important roadmap commitments, but engineers and technical leads are also absorbing administrative work around Jira, ceremonies, follow-up, dependency management, and delivery coordination.

•  Several critical initiatives require work across multiple teams and functions. Without dedicated delivery leadership, cross-functional dependencies can slow execution or leave ownership unclear.

•  The engineering organization needs stronger sprint readiness, backlog hygiene, retrospective discipline, delivery visibility, and follow-through without creating a heavyweight PMO model.

•  This role should increase engineering capacity by allowing technical leaders to spend more time engineering while improving execution discipline, transparency, and accountability across the organization.

Core Mission

Build and lead a practical engineering delivery operating rhythm that improves execution, reduces administrative burden on technical teams, strengthens cross-functional program delivery, and creates clear visibility into priorities, risks, dependencies, decisions, and outcomes.

What This Role Is and Is Not

Key Responsibilities

Engineering Delivery and Agile Discipline

•  Own and improve the engineering delivery rhythm across multiple teams, including sprint planning, backlog refinement, stand-ups, retrospectives, release readiness, and delivery follow-through.

•  Maintain strong Jira board discipline, including backlog hygiene, sprint readiness, ownership, acceptance criteria, dependency visibility, and status accuracy.

•  Help teams distinguish committed work, planned work, operational work, defects, technical debt, and urgent production needs so capacity and tradeoffs are visible.

•  Facilitate practical Agile ceremonies that result in decisions, actions, and improved execution rather than meetings for their own sake.

•  Improve retrospective quality and ensure improvement actions are assigned, tracked, and revisited until closed or intentionally retired.

Cross-Functional Program Leadership

•  Drive selected strategic technology initiatives that span Product, Engineering, Data, Platform, QA, Security, Compliance, Operations, and business stakeholders.

•  Create integrated delivery plans with clear milestones, owners, dependencies, decision points, risks, acceptance criteria, and handoff expectations.

•  Coordinate work across teams when no single engineering squad owns the entire outcome.

•  Facilitate working sessions and decision-making when technical, product, operational, or compliance dependencies block progress.

•  Maintain momentum on high-priority programs while balancing normal sprint commitments, production support, and shifting business priorities.

Jira, Delivery Operations, and Visibility

•  Establish consistent Jira practices for epics, stories, tasks, dependencies, risks, release readiness, and delivery reporting.

•  Reduce stale backlog, duplicate work, unclear ownership, incomplete tickets, and administrative noise that make engineering priorities harder to understand.

•  Create lightweight dashboards and reporting that show delivery health, blockers, dependencies, aging work, throughput, and major milestones.

•  Maintain clear action, decision, risk, and dependency tracking for cross-functional initiatives.

•  Reduce the amount of project administration performed by engineers and technical leads while preserving their accountability for technical outcomes.

Risk, Dependency, and Executive Communication

•  Identify delivery risks, cross-team dependencies, resource constraints, scope ambiguity, and decision gaps early enough for leadership to act.

•  Escalate issues with clear context, impact, options, owners, and recommended next steps rather than simply reporting that a project is at risk.

•  Translate engineering delivery status into concise business language for technology and business leadership.

•  Help technical teams make tradeoffs explicit when roadmap delivery, production support, compliance, technical debt, and urgent requests compete for capacity.

Continuous Improvement and Team Enablement

•  Use retrospectives, delivery data, incident learnings, and team feedback to identify practical process improvements.

•  Coach teams and leads on backlog quality, estimation, sprint readiness, ownership, dependency management, and effective Agile practices.

•  Support a culture of low-ego collaboration, transparency, accountability, root-cause problem solving, and continuous improvement.

•  Create simple operating standards, templates, and repeatable practices that make good delivery behavior easier without slowing teams down.

Current Tech Stack and Operating Environment

Client operates a modern healthcare technology environment supporting pharmacy navigation, member experience, recommendation workflows, data movement, client reporting, partner integrations, and operational processes. The Engineering Delivery / Agile Lead does not need to be a deep expert in every technology, but must be technically fluent enough to understand delivery dependencies and work credibly with teams operating across:

Engineering and Delivery Tooling

•  Jira for engineering backlog, sprint, epic, dependency, and delivery management.

•  Confluence and related documentation practices.

•  GitHub, CI/CD, release workflows, and modern SDLC practices.

•  Agile / Scrum and Kanban delivery patterns across distributed teams.

Platform, Application, and Data Context

•  AWS, EKS / Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, observability, and production support.

•  Java / Spring Boot, Python, APIs, partner integrations, and application services.

•  Snowflake, dbt, Airflow, SQL, Tableau, data pipelines, analytics, and reporting workflows.

•  QA, test automation, UAT, security, compliance, release readiness, and incident follow-up.

Business and Operating Context

•  A lean engineering organization with U.S., nearshore, offshore, employee, and contractor contributors.

•  Multiple concurrent priorities including roadmap delivery, production operations, technical debt, client commitments, and strategic technology initiatives.

•  A regulated healthcare environment where delivery discipline, traceability, security, data quality, and operational reliability matter to client trust.

Required Qualifications

•  7+ years of experience in technology delivery, technical program management, Agile delivery, Scrum leadership, engineering operations, project delivery, or related roles.

•  Significant experience working directly with software engineering, data engineering, cloud/platform, DevOps, QA, or other technical delivery teams.

•  Demonstrated success driving complex initiatives across multiple technical and business functions.

•  Strong hands-on Jira experience, including boards, workflows, backlogs, epics, dependencies, reporting, and delivery metrics.

•  Strong practical understanding of Agile and Scrum, including sprint planning, refinement, stand-ups, retrospectives, release readiness, and continuous improvement.

•  Ability to identify delivery risks, clarify ownership, manage dependencies, drive decisions, and maintain follow-through without relying on formal authority.

•  Enough technical fluency to understand engineering conversations, delivery dependencies, architecture implications, production concerns, and SDLC practices.

•  Strong written and verbal communication skills with engineers, product leaders, executives, business stakeholders, and external partners.

•  Experience working in distributed, global, offshore, nearshore, contractor, or partner-based delivery environments.

•  Ability to operate effectively in a lean, fast-moving organization where priorities can change and process must remain practical.

Preferred Qualifications

•  Experience as a Technical Program Manager, Engineering Delivery Lead, Delivery Manager, Scrum Master, Release Train Engineer, Engineering Operations Lead, or similar role.

•  Experience supporting SaaS products, cloud platforms, data platforms, APIs, enterprise integrations, or regulated production systems.

•  Experience with AWS, Kubernetes, Snowflake, Airflow, dbt, GitHub, CI/CD, Java, Python, or comparable modern engineering environments.

•  Experience leading technical debt, platform modernization, data migration, security/compliance, release-management, or other cross-functional technology programs.

•  Experience improving poorly functioning retrospectives, backlog hygiene, board discipline, delivery metrics, or multi-team planning practices.

•  Agile, Scrum, PMP, SAFe, or related delivery certifications. Certifications are helpful but practical delivery experience is more important.

•  Experience in healthcare, pharmacy, payer, benefits, life sciences, financial services, or another regulated environment.

Ideal Candidate Profile

•  An engineering delivery leader at the core, not simply an administrator of Agile ceremonies.

•  Structured and organized enough to create clarity, but pragmatic enough not to over-process a lean organization.

•  Technically fluent enough to earn credibility with engineers and identify when a dependency, estimate, handoff, or risk does not make sense.

•  Comfortable challenging teams and leaders when ownership, commitments, sequencing, or decisions are unclear.

•  Able to move from a Jira board discussion to an executive risk conversation to a cross-functional project working session without losing context.

•  Strong at follow-through, action closure, documentation, decision tracking, and making hidden work visible.

•  Calm and structured when priorities shift, production issues emerge, or several teams need to coordinate under time pressure.

•  Low ego, outcome-oriented, curious, autonomous, and comfortable operating through influence rather than hierarchy.

Delivery and Operating Context for Candidates

•  Client is strengthening its engineering operating model while protecting active roadmap, platform, data, security, QA, and client commitments.

•  The role is expected to make existing engineers more effective, not create another layer between engineers and decision-makers.

•  Day-to-day Agile discipline and cross-functional program leadership are equally important. The role must be able to operate at both levels.

•  Retrospectives should produce measurable learning and follow-through. Jira should reflect real work and real ownership, not become an administrative artifact maintained after the fact.

•  Product Management remains responsible for product strategy and prioritization. This role partners with Product to help Engineering translate priorities into executable, visible, and reliable delivery plans.

•  Success should be measured by clearer ownership, fewer hidden dependencies, faster issue resolution, stronger follow-through, better delivery predictability, and reduced administrative burden on technical leaders.