Chief Delivery Officer

Role Overview

The Chief Delivery Officer owns end-to-end delivery of Pennant’s lending platform implementations: Strategy → Planning → Mobilization → Build & Test → Deploy → Hypercare → Run (governance only). You will revisit and scale the delivery organization and operating model, protect delivery margin, quality and customer satisfaction, orchestrate multi-vendor and system-integrator programs, and ensure RFP and POC commitments are deliverable and accurately costed.

Deep lending systems expertise across the full lifecycle is essential.

What you will focus on

• Revisit and enhance delivery and implementation framework across programs and geographies that is scalable.
• Improving delivery predictability, margin and customer outcomes.
• Growing and developing the delivery organization as Pennant expands.

Key Responsibilities

Implementation strategy & leadership

• Revisit and enhance the implementation operating model (phases, stage gates, roles, forums, cadence) and rollout strategy, including pilot, phased and cutover approaches.
• Co-own SOWs and contracts with Sales: scope, deliverables, acceptance, milestones, service levels and change control.
• Own the integrated implementation plan: WBS, critical path, capacity and skills, partner plan, budget and revenue milestones.
• Lead business process mapping (fitment vs. gaps) to align customer lending processes with the product, feeding SOW scope, change requests and configuration.
• Ensure environment and data readiness, including migrations, rehearsals, reconciliations, cutover runbook and rollback.
• Govern testing (system, integration, E2E, UAT), non-functional requirements and regulatory sign-offs.
• Execute cutover and hypercare with clear SLAs, then hand off cleanly to steady-state support.
• Lead customer governance (kick-off, design reviews, CABs, go/no-go) and executive communications.

Delivery operations & controls

• Maintain the Delivery & Implementation Playbook (templates, RACI, entry/exit criteria).
• Run a Control Tower with live status, risks, forecast, schedule and cost variance, and quality.
• Drive operational excellence: weekly operating rhythm, throughput and predictability, estimate variance and rework.
• Standardize QA, release and environments, data migration, UAT and cutover; enforce DR/BCP and change governance.
• Embed regulatory checkpoints, privacy controls and audit evidence in stage gates.

Revenue, accounts & partners

• Own delivery-linked revenue: milestone invoicing, revenue-recognition hygiene and forecast cadence with Finance.
• Drive the change-request and feature-build pipeline.
• With Sales and Customer Success, grow accounts through success plans, adoption playbooks and executive relationships.
• Orchestrate vendors and system integrators: onboarding, acceptance criteria, scorecards, and integrated planning, testing and cutover.

People leadership

• Build and scale teams across Programs / Portfolio, Business Analysis, QA, Release & Environments, Data Migration and Professional Services.
• Plan capacity and skills, drive performance management and coaching, and strengthen learning, certification and succession.

Production support governance

• Set policy, SLOs, risk gates and escalation frameworks, and review incident and reliability trends. Day-to-day L2/L3 support sits with the Head of Support / SRE; the CDO engages on major incidents and delivery-impacting risks.

Pre-sales support

• Shape RFP responses and POCs (approach, estimates, assumptions, risks) and ensure a clean handover from award to mobilization.

How Success Is Measured

Success in this role is assessed across delivery predictability, implementation quality, revenue and margin, customer satisfaction, partner performance, team health and operational reliability.

Must have

• Bachelor’s degree in Business, Computer Science or Engineering.
• 20+ years of progressive leadership in delivery and operations, including [8]+ years managing large multi-program portfolios and multi-vendor / SI engagements.
• Deep lending systems expertise across the full lifecycle [origination, servicing, collections - specify], with hands-on leadership of core lending platform implementations.
• Experience in regulated BFSI environments: regulatory sign-offs, audit evidence, DR/BCP.
• Track record of owning delivery margin, forecasting and SOW / commercial constructs.
• Experience building and scaling multi-location delivery teams.
• Credibility with customer executives and the ability to lead SI and vendor partners.

Nice to have

MBA.

Certifications such as PMP / PRINCE2, PgMP, SAFe / Agile, Lean Six Sigma, ITIL.

Experience in an IT product company serving banks and financial institutions.

About Pennant :

Pennant Technologies is a financial technology company that powers the lending operations of banks and financial institutions worldwide. Our lending platform offers composable features and scalable capabilities for loan origination, servicing and collections, and has managed more than 10 million loans while facilitating 100 million loan transactions a year.Headquartered in Hyderabad, Pennant hasoffices and operations in India, the Middle East (including Saudi Arabia),Australia, the Philippines and the UK, with a team of 450+ people that isgrowing as we expand across geographies. Learn more at www.pennanttech.com.