Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Element451 is building the AI-powered platform reshaping how colleges and universities recruit, enroll, and support their students. The Team Lead, Delivery Management will lead a focused engineering team, managing delivery outcomes and ensuring quality and velocity from planning to production.
Responsibilities
- You 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. Senior and Principal Engineers provide technical direction and own architecture within their defined scope
- 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. This is heaviest at small scale and trends toward leadership as the team reaches full size
- Reinforce the technical standards owned by your senior and principal engineers — hold the team accountable to code quality, review thoroughness, testing, and sound architecture, and create the conditions for those standards to be applied consistently rather than only under pressure
- 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. No surprises
Skills
- 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
- A genuine commitment to building an AI-forward team
- Strong communication at both the engineering-detail and leadership-summary levels
- Familiarity with Shape Up or a comparable approach
Company Overview