Senior Delivery Lead in London

At Champion Data, our dedicated team are united by sport and driven by data. We strive to revolutionise and transform sport data globally by leveraging our cutting-edge technology and expert team, ensuring we deliver the best possible outcomes for our partners and clients.

About the job

Champion Data has an exciting opportunity for an experienced and dedicated Senior Delivery Lead to join our team!

The Delivery Lead leads the delivery of ongoing technology services and initiatives for some of the biggest names in European and international sport. You will take new initiatives from first conversation through to release and into ongoing operation, planning them into live delivery alongside support, maintenance and ad hoc work, with the autonomy, within agreed boundaries, to shape how it gets done.

You will bring scope, schedule, cost, quality and risk together into one clear plan, and keep clients, product owners, engineers and suppliers pulling in the same direction. You will own that plan, be a senior voice in the client relationship alongside the Customer Service Manager, and make decisions and bring recommendations when delivery is ambiguous or contested. Our delivery runs to live match days and fixed season deadlines, so the role suits someone who stays calm, plans ahead and makes good calls under pressure.

This is a senior, hands-on role. You will be technically credible enough to challenge estimates and hold your own with senior engineers. You will lead one or more delivery teams, coach the people around you, and solve the planning, dependency and risk problems that hold delivery back. You will typically split your time across more than one client engagement, and may move between engagements as work changes.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Skills

• Build integrated delivery plans across scope, schedule, cost, risk and dependencies, including work that spans multiple teams.
• Lead scope management proactively to protect milestones and timeboxes: challenge scope decisions, and guide stakeholders to prioritise by value and defer lower-priority work to later timeboxes, using MVP thinking and clear change control. Help clients make informed scope decisions, rather than accepting scope without question or deciding on their behalf.
• Make sure acceptance and release-readiness criteria exist and are applied, facilitating their completeness, and use defect and incident trends to keep quality high.
• Facilitate the conversation on balancing new features against non-functional requirements such as performance, reliability and maintainability, and advocate for them with the client, so what we ship keeps working on match day.
• Manage milestones and the critical path against client and season deadlines, and forecast from delivery data so recovery options are on the table early.
• Run a living risk and issue register, and escape with options, not just problems.
• Track effort and forecasts, explain the cost of scope and timing decisions, and keep delivery within the commercial agreement.
• Make the case for the right team size and skill mix for sustainable delivery.
• Report status clearly and honestly through RAG and RAID reporting, demos and executive updates.
• Translate between business needs and technical delivery, and guide sensible technical trade-offs.

Delivery

• Work with the team to break epics and releases into well-understood, prioritised work, with dependencies visible to everyone.
• Apply Agile and Lean practices pragmatically, choosing the right approach for the work rather than the textbook one, eg using Scrum for the team's execution within the plan and flow-based approaches such as Kanban for support work.
• Set realistic commitments, deliver them, and flag blockers early.
• Agree roles and expectations with clients and suppliers, and judge change on the value it adds.
• Act as the escalation point for your engagements, including through releases and live events; own the response to escalations from live operations and L3 support that need developer investigation or fixes, including client communication and the impact on planned work.
• Co‑own the client relationship with the Customer Service Manager: agree risks, trade-offs and expectation messages with them before they go to the client, so the client hears one voice.
• Bring clients along on hard messages about scope, timing or quality: frame the issue with a recommended way forward, ask the questions that draw out what is really needed, and secure agreement rather than just reporting.
• Work with whoever owns requirements on the client side to turn client needs into high-level requirements the team can refine and plan, and cover and coach where that capability is still developing.
• Facilitate sprint reviews, retrospectives and post‑implementation reviews that actually change how the team works. Where the team runs them well itself, make sure they continue to happen and remain effective, without needing to take part.
• Communicate clearly to technical and non-technical audiences, and keep handovers, closure reports and lessons learned up to date.
• Build strong relationships across engineering, product and client teams, and keep disagreement constructive.

Leadership

• Be a leader, not a manager. Lead by example, support team decisions and own delivery outcomes, and keep everyone aligned to the goal.
• Build the team's autonomy, capability and ownership through coaching and context.
• Create a safe, inclusive environment where everyone has a voice, and look after team health and resilience.
• Improve how we deliver, and help shape our delivery standards.
• Facilitate workshops and cross-team sessions, including the difficult ones.
• Desirable: mentor teammates and less experienced Delivery Leads.

About You

• A tertiary qualification in Information Technology, Computer Science, Business, Project Management or a related field, or equivalent professional experience delivering technology projects.
• Desirable: a recognised project delivery certification, for example PMP, APM PQ or PRINCE2, together with a Scrum certification such as PSM or CSM.
• Desirable: membership of a professional body such as APM or PMI, and working knowledge of ITIL, BABOK or Lean/Kanban.
• Typically 8 or more years in professional delivery roles, leading ongoing technology services, projects or releases end to end.
• A technical background, for example as a Developer, Tech Lead, Solutions Architect or technical delivery manager, with a working knowledge of the SDLC, cloud services, APIs, data feeds and integrations, and the depth to challenge estimates and technical approaches with senior engineers.
• A track record of delivering with integrated planning, change control, critical-path and risk management, and release readiness.
• A track record of owning the overall delivery plan and making decisions under ambiguity and contention, including finding a fix rather than only raising the problem.
• In-depth knowledge of Agile and Lean, with hands‑on Scrum experience, using delivery data to forecast and re‑plan, and anchoring delivery to plan, milestones and timeboxes rather than being sprint‑led.
• An outcome focus: delivering value early, building fast feedback loops and making decisions from data.
• Confident reporting to and influencing sponsors, clients and executives, including delivering difficult messages in a way that brings them along, in writing and in the room.
• Experience managing a client relationship alongside an account or service manager, including managing expectations and scope.
• Experience facilitating workshops and building consensus between stakeholders with competing priorities.
• Experience making sure delivery meets governance, compliance and regulatory requirements.
• Requirements gathering, analysis and documentation, including shaping high‑level requirements with a client Product Owner.
• Proficiency with Jira and Confluence, and reporting tools such as Excel or Power BI.

Advantageous

• Owning project budgets and explaining the financial impact of delivery decisions.
• Managing suppliers and vendors, including contracts, SOWs and SLAs.
• Leading delivery across multiple teams, and mentoring less experienced delivery staff.
• Coaching teams towards agility, safety and continuous learning, and turning around struggling teams.
• Experience with time and capacity tools such as Tempo.
• Experience in live, time‑critical or match‑day operations.
• Delivery experience in a UK or European commercial context.
• A genuine interest in sport and a willingness to get into the detail of the sports data you deliver.

Tell me more about Champion Data

For over 20 years, Champion data has been at the forefront of delivering sports stats globally.With a global presence in Australia, the USA, the UK, and Asia, we specialise in real‑time data collection, storage, analysis, distribution, and visualisation. We track every play and movement, delivering unbeatable game intel through seamless integration systems. Our unrivalled visual packages, in partnership with leading media outlets, ensure a sensational sports broadcast experience. We

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