Head of Delivery

About the Client

Our client is a custom software development agency. They deliver a live, custom SaaS platform (an automotive marketing platform) for a single enterprise client worth about $3M per year. The platform is built and in production. The engineering team is an offshore team based in Poland. The client is demanding, hands-on, and technical.

About the Role
They are hiring one senior owner to run this account end to end. You will own the client relationship, delivery and quality, the engineering vendor's output, and ultimately the account P&L. You are the person the client escalates to and the person the team answers to. Your job is to run this account so well that it no longer needs the founders' day-to-day involvement, and then to grow it.
This is a high-trust, high-authority seat. We are giving you the levers: the mandate over the delivery team, sign-off on what ships, and the commercial authority to manage scope with the client. We expect you to use all levers.
This is a role for someone who wants to own one thing completely and make it excellent, not juggle a portfolio. You treat the account like it is your own business. You care that the client actually wins, not just that tickets close. The first 6 to 12 months are a genuine turnaround and will be hard: a tense relationship to repair, a backlog to clear, and real pressure to absorb. The difference between this and a thankless grind is that you hold the levers to fix the root causes and a real stake in the result with upside (see Compensation).

What you will own

• The client relationship. Be the single senior point of contact for a demanding, technical client and their CEO. Absorb and resolve escalations so they stop reaching out to the founders that then play telephone. Run the commercial conversations on scope and priorities directly.
• Delivery and quality. Fix a release process that breaks production too often. Stand up real QA. Get defects caught internally before the client ever sees them. Own the data integrity, reporting accuracy, and uptime that this account lives and dies on.
• The engineering team. Hold the offshore team accountable for the quality and timeliness of their output. Set the standards, judge the work, and escalate within the Polish dev team when it is not good enough. Praise the engineering team when they do well.
• The roadmap and growth. Own the account roadmap and grow it into new product lines over time, continue the growth of this account to be an expanding one.
• The operating model. Replace informal, undocumented ways of working with a clear structure: one source of truth for the team, a real escalation path, and a governance cadence the client trusts.

Must-have qualifications

• 12 to 18+ years of experience, with at least 5 years owning delivery or engineering for a team of roughly 15 to 30 people.
• Technical depth. You came up through software engineering and can read code, architecture, and a ticket board well enough to judge whether a root-cause explanation is real or an excuse, and to evaluate the engineering team's work directly. You can write code and could drop in to audit or in an emergency or to demo a new feature idea or architecture, but you will rarely write production code in this role. Your job is judgment, authority, and process. “Can code, mostly leads” is the standard.
• A track record of turning around a broken release-and-QA process: staging gates, automated regression testing, and a real QA function. You will be asked to walk through a specific example.
• Experience managing an offshore or nearshore engineering team.
• Experience as the single senior owner of a demanding, technical client account, with the relationship kept healthy.
• Fluent, executive-level English, and the presence to peer with and push back on a demanding US founder-CEO.

Technology stack
The platform is .NET / C# on SQL Server and Azure. Microsoft / .NET / Azure background is strongly preferred, especially Azure cost management and migration experience. We will not screen out an outstanding turnaround and offshore-delivery leader whose background is Java or AWS, but .NET and Azure experience is a strong advantage.

Work expectations and hours
This is a full-time, high-ownership role, and it runs hot, especially early. Expect roughly 40 to 50 hours per week depending on the phase: heavier during the first 6 to 12 month turnaround and during client incidents, settling toward the lower end as the platform stabilizes. Work anchors to US business hours.
Weekend work is not the expectation and not the norm. That said, during incidents or critical releases it could happen, and we are telling you that honestly up front. Part of your mandate is to build the release safety and the on-call rota that make weekends and long hours are genuinely rare rather than routine, so the role is sustainable over the long run rather than a permanent grind.

Time zones and overlap (required)
This role sits between a US client and a Poland-based engineering team, so it requires daily overlap with both. Your day anchors to US business hours for the client. You also need to be online early enough in the US morning to overlap the Polish team's afternoon, since Poland runs about six hours ahead of US Eastern. That morning window is when you run standups, unblock the team, and catch issues before they roll downhill, so in practice it means an early start most days. This dual-overlap requirement is the same regardless of where in the Americas you are based; it is a function of the role, not the location.