Delivery Head

We are looking for an experienced, hands-on Head of Fixed-Price Delivery to lead our project delivery organisation, improve project profitability, and establish a culture of accountability, engineering excellence, and predictable execution.

The role will initially oversee approximately 10–20 concurrent fixed-price projects and 25–50 delivery professionals, including project managers, technical leads, developers, QA engineers, and other specialists.

The ideal candidate will combine strong software engineering experience with proven expertise in managing project budgets, controlling scope, leading multidisciplinary teams, and delivering profitable client engagements.

This is a business-critical leadership position with direct reporting to the CEO and the authority to improve delivery processes, team structures, and performance.

Key Responsibilities

1. Project Profitability and Financial Management

• Take ownership of financial performance across the fixed-price delivery portfolio.
• Establish project-level budgeting, effort tracking, cost forecasting, and profitability reporting.
• Monitor actual costs against approved budgets and estimated costs to complete.
• Identify potential overruns early and implement corrective actions.
• Improve delivery margins through better planning, productivity, resource utilisation, and execution discipline.
• Work with Finance to establish accurate, consistent project margin reporting.

2. Project Planning and Execution

• Ensure projects begin with clear requirements, deliverables, acceptance criteria, milestones, and resource plans.
• Validate delivery plans and identify unrealistic schedules, dependencies, and technical risks.
• Establish standardised project governance and weekly delivery reviews.
• Improve schedule predictability, milestone completion, and resource allocation.
• Personally intervene in critical or under performing projects and lead recovery efforts.

3. Scope and Change Management

• Establish disciplined requirements management and scope control.
• Ensure all changes are documented and assessed for their impact on effort, cost, and timelines.
• Work with Sales and Account Management to obtain commercial approval for additional scope.
• Prevent unapproved work from creating unnecessary delivery costs.
• Ensure project teams understand and adhere to contractual scope and acceptance criteria.

4. Engineering Quality and Delivery Efficiency

• Work closely with technical leads to review architecture, engineering estimates, and implementation approaches.
• Identify technical decisions that may create rework, complexity, or delivery delays.
• Improve development practices, code review discipline, testing, and quality assurance.
• Reduce avoidable defects, repeated rework, and inefficient engineering practices.
• Encourage practical adoption of AI-assisted development and automation where they demonstrably improve productivity and quality.

5. People Leadership and Accountability

• Lead project managers, technical leads, and delivery teams.
• Establish clear ownership, performance expectations, and accountability across projects.
• Review the capabilities of existing delivery leaders and identify coaching, training, or organisational changes required.
• Build a strong culture of ownership, transparency, and problem-solving.
• Make resource allocation and performance management decisions to improve delivery outcomes.

6. Client Communication and Satisfaction

• Ensure proactive communication on project progress, risks, and changes.
• Intervene in escalations and manage difficult delivery situations constructively.
• Improve client confidence through transparent reporting and predictable execution.
• Protect delivery quality and client relationships while improving project profitability.

Required Experience and Qualifications

• Significant experience in software engineering and technical project delivery, preferably 12+ years.
• At least 5 years in a leadership role managing multiple software delivery projects.
• Demonstrated experience managing fixed-price software development projects with direct financial accountability.
• Strong understanding of project budgeting, gross margins, resource costs, cost-to-complete forecasting, and scope management.
• Experience leading project managers and technical leads across multiple engagements.
• Sound technical understanding of custom web applications, SaaS platforms, APIs, databases, mobile applications, and modern software architectures.
• Familiarity with AI, GenAI, automation, or data engineering project delivery.
• Experience working directly with international clients.
• Strong analytical, leadership, communication, and decision-making skills.

Highly Preferred

• Experience in an outsourced software product development, digital engineering, or IT services company.
• Proven record of improving fixed-price project margins or recovering troubled projects.
• Experience establishing delivery governance and financial controls where processes were previously immature.
• Ability to challenge engineering assumptions without unnecessarily micromanaging technical teams.
• Experience managing distributed engineering teams and working across multiple technology stacks.