Senior Delivery Manager in Leeds

Alternatively, Grant Thornton

At Grant Thornton we do things differently - looking to the future, driving ambitious growth and pioneering positive change in our industry. Providing audit, tax and advisory services, we empower clients through strategic insight, curiosity, and genuine partnership. And we empower our people with real opportunity, an inclusive culture and work life balance. A true alternative.

With over 5,000 people in the UK, and a presence in 150 global markets, we're on an ambitious journey, from great to exceptional, and we need the best people to help us achieve our potential. And with that comes the opportunity to help redefine what our industry looks like, and what you want from your career.

Job Description:

MORE THAN YOU EXPECTED

Grant Thornton UK LLP is part of a global network of independent audit, tax and advisory firms, made up of some 58,000 people in over 135 countries. We're a team of independent thinkers who put quality, inclusion and integrity first. All around the world we bring a different experience to our clients. A better experience. One that delivers the expertise they need in a way that goes beyond. Personal, proactive, and agile. That's Grant Thornton.

NEW GROUND WON'T BREAK ITSELF.

Every day our teams help people in businesses and communities to do what is right and achieve their goals.

As an Engineering Delivery Manager in our engineering function at GT, you will hold two connected responsibilities. Your priority is people management: line-managing a group of engineers and owning their growth, wellbeing and performance. Alongside that, you are the delivery and agile lead for one or more pods, owning capacity, flow and ways of working so those pods can do their best work.

We work in a matrix, so the people you line-manage and the people in the pods you support will not always be the same. Wherever we can we will align you to a domain and to the engineers within it, though while the function is still growing you may cover more than one pod or domain. People management is deliberately sticky: your reports stay with you for at least a full review cycle, and manager changes happen at natural review points rather than every time someone moves between pods.

Technical direction sits with the Tech Lead in each pod, and the what and the why sit with its Product Manager. This is a people, delivery and ways-of-working leadership role, not a hands-on coding one. We do not hire separate agile coaches, so the agile practice in your pods is yours to lead.

You will also help bring three former teams into one engineering function, working in an AI-native way with modern tooling, at a point when how we work is genuinely still taking shape and there is real room to influence it.

We're happy to talk flexible working and consider reduced hours and job shares, we'll support you to balance your work and life.

A look into the role

As an Engineering Delivery Manager at GT, you will:

Team leadership, people and resourcing

• Line-manage and develop a group of engineers, through regular one to ones, honest feedback and real career conversations. This is your primary focus, and your reports may be deployed across more than one delivery pod
• Own the growth, wellbeing and performance of the people you manage, drawing on input from the pods and leads they work with day to day
• Build trust and psychological safety with your people, so they feel able to ask questions, admit what they do not know, and do their best work
• Lead hiring, onboarding and retention for the people you manage
• Own capacity and resource allocation for one or more pods, making sure the right engineers, skills and balance of experience are available to support what the pod is being asked to deliver, and being clear when capacity, skills or dependencies mean something cannot land as planned
• Support everyone in the pods you lead to do their best work regardless of who manages them, and feed back to their managers on how they are getting on

Agile practice and delivery coaching

• Act as the agile practitioner for your pods, choosing and implementing the ways of working that fit, and coaching each team to run its own ceremonies well
• Use agile and lean techniques to keep improving the delivery cycle, and facilitate directly where a pod is not yet able to do that for itself
• Raise agile maturity across engineering by sharing what works between pods, so each one is not solving the same problem on its own
• Draw on the Agile Community of Practice for professional guidance, peer support and craft development, separate from your line-management reporting into the Head of Engineering

Delivery support and blocker resolution

• Use your knowledge of the software delivery lifecycle to spot blockers and delivery risks early, and remove the ones the pod cannot resolve itself
• Track flow metrics and use them to drive real improvement in how the pod works, rather than as a reporting exercise
• Partner with the Product Manager in each pod.