Delivery Manager New in London

We are seeking a highly organized and proactive Delivery Manager to play a critical role in protecting a continuous delivery cadence within our pre-trade domain. You will act as a central point for backlog ownership and delivery flow across several product teams, coordinating delivery, prioritising demand, and driving execution in JIRA. This role requires commercial acumen, technical awareness, and the ability to collaborate closely with trading desks and quant researchers in tight feedback loops. In our environment, time-to-value is everything: “good enough shipped today” often beats “perfect shipped next quarter”.

Backlog Ownership and Management

• Own and maintain multiple product backlogs in JIRA across pre-trade initiatives, prioritising items based on strategic business input, user demand, and resource availability.
• Translate commercial urgency into actionable, prioritised backlogs (clear sequencing, explicit trade-offs, minimal overhead).

Sprint Planning and Delivery Sequencing

• Define, schedule, and manage sprint planning, sequencing delivery based on resource allocation, ensuring timely execution of tasks and efficient backlog turnover.
• Establish and protect a continuous delivery rhythm — short cycles, frequent releases, and tight feedback loops with trading desks and quant researchers.
• Default to unblocking over gatekeeping: remove impediments, reduce handoffs, and keep work flowing.
• Treat delivery as a continuous flow problem, not a project with a fixed start/end.

Demand Capture and Roadmap Development

• Collect, review, and analyse new business and technical demands.
• Develop strategic product and data roadmaps for future enhancements in data ingestion, storage, and distribution.
• Be comfortable with ambiguity and make pragmatic trade-offs between speed, scope, and quality, explicitly optimising for time-to-value where appropriate.

Stakeholder Coordination and Communications

• Act as a central point of contact, gathering requirements and providing updates to traders, analysts, technical teams, and product owners to maintain alignment and transparency.
• Translate fast-changing commercial priorities into clear decisions, crisp priorities, and predictable delivery outcomes (what/why/when, with visible risks and dependencies).

Resource Needs and Allocation Management

• Monitor, anticipate, and communicate resource requirements, ensuring optimal allocation and readiness for each sprint cycle.
• Proactively surface constraints (capacity, environments, data availability, approvals) and drive resolution to protect delivery cadence.

Continuous Improvement and Best Practice Implementation

• Champion process improvements in backlog hygiene, sprint execution, and agile delivery practices.
• Recommend enhancements to tooling, workflow, and reporting.
• Track and improve flow and outcomes metrics (e.g., lead time, cycle time, deployment frequency, change failure rate / incident impact where applicable).
• Avoid vanity metrics (e.g. user story points).
• Build a culture of continuous improvement: faster feedback, smaller batch sizes, simpler processes, higher reliability.

The ideal candidate disposes of:

• Proven experience (10+ years) in delivery management, backlog ownership, or agile delivery within a data-centric or commodities trading organisation.
• Proven track record managing multiple, concurrent backlogs and coordinating delivery priorities across diverse teams.
• Experience engaging directly with traders, analysts, quant researchers, and technology teams to translate business needs into actionable delivery backlogs.
• Strong grasp of delivery cadence and continuous delivery principles in high-performing engineering environments (frequent releases, tight feedback loops, flow efficiency).
• Demonstrated use of flow metrics (lead time, cycle time, deployment frequency, throughput/aging WIP) to drive delivery improvements — not story point velocity.
• Commercially savvy; understands that in trading, time-to-value and responsiveness materially impact outcomes.
• Familiarity with market data concepts and how trading organisations consume data (e.g., curves, vol surfaces, pricing inputs, reference data, exchange/vendor feeds).
• Practice in developing and communicating strategic data roadmaps tailored to rapidly changing business needs.
• Ability to anticipate, plan and coordinate resource allocation required for backlog delivery.

Skills:

Functional Skills

• Expert in managing product backlogs, delivery sequencing, and JIRA administration.
• Proficient in capturing, specifying, and allocating requirements for both market data (e.g. curves, volatilities, vendor feeds) and fundamental data (e.g. flows, forecasts).
• Skilled in roadmap development and backlog prioritisation based on business value, risk, and technical constraints.
• Able to facilitate crisp trade-offs between speed/scope/quality, keeping stakeholders aligned and delivery unblocked.

Technical Skills

• Familiarity with requirements gathering for historical and real-time streaming data (e.g. SQL Server, Kafka, MongoDB).
• Experience with modern data/analytics stacks and cloud-native delivery patterns: Databricks, Spark, Airflow, Docker, Kubernetes; Azure preferred.
• Able to specify validation controls for missing, duplicate, stale, or anomalous data; understands controls and observability expectations in data pipelines.
• Experience with data visualisation and monitoring tools (e.g. Tableau, Dash, Grafana).
• Understanding of market vs fundamental data use cases (valuation, risk, physical flow analytics) and stakeholder expectations in trading contexts.

Professional Skills

• Strong stakeholder management, communication, and cross-functional coordination abilities.
• Calm under pressure, pragmatic problem solver, and relationship builder.
• Expert in Agile/Scrum ways of working without adding process overhead; experienced in geographically dispersed delivery environments.