Satalia
Delivery Manager -UK - Permanent
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Delivery Manager
Role type: Permanent, Full Time
Location: UK
Preferred start date: ASAP
LIFE AS A SATALIAN
As an organisation, we push the boundaries of data science, optimisation, and artificial intelligence to solve the most complex problems in the industry. Satalia, a WPP Company, is a community of individuals devoted to working on diverse and challenging projects, allowing you to flex your technical skills whilst working with a tight-knit team of high-performing colleagues.
Led by our founder (who is also WPP’s Chief AI Officer), Satalia’s ambition is to become a decentralised organisation of the future. Today, this involves developing tools and processes to liberate and automate manual repetitive tasks, with a focus on freedom, transparency, and trust. At the core of our thinking is an approach to wellbeing and inclusivity. We unpack human behaviour and unpick prejudice to ensure a safe and inviting environment. We offer truly flexible working and allow our employees to find the working practice that makes them most productive. At Satalia, your opinion matters and your achievements are celebrated.
THE ROLE
We are looking for an experienced Delivery Manager to lead the successful delivery of software, AI, data, and optimisation projects across Satalia.
As a Delivery Manager, you will be responsible for helping cross-functional teams plan, coordinate, and deliver high-quality work. You will work closely with product managers, engineering leads, designers, data scientists, stakeholders, and teams to ensure that delivery is well understood, well planned, actively managed, and clearly communicated.
This role is about bringing delivery discipline, planning clarity, and execution focus to teams working on complex problems. You will ensure that product priorities are translated into realistic plans, work is properly refined and estimated, dependencies are managed, risks are visible, and delivery commitments are credible.
You will need to be close to the details of delivery. That means understanding what is in the backlog, what has been handed over by product, what is ready for estimation, what is committed in a sprint, what is blocked, who owns each item, and when work is expected to be delivered.
We are looking for someone who can provide delivery grip: someone diligent, structured, proactive, and comfortable holding teams and stakeholders to account in a constructive way. Strong knowledge of Agile facilitation and continuous improvement is also important, particularly where it helps teams plan effectively, improve flow, and deliver consistently.
You do not need to be a deeply technical engineering leader, but you must be comfortable working in software delivery environments and able to engage with enough technical and product detail to ask good questions, challenge ambiguity, expose dependencies, and support good delivery decisions.
DELIVERY PLANNING AND EXECUTION
- Create, maintain, and communicate clear delivery plans that turn product priorities and client needs into realistic delivery timelines.
- Own capacity and resource planning across delivery teams, ensuring available skills and resources are aligned to planned work, priorities, and delivery commitments.
- Ensure work is properly refined, estimated, sequenced, planned, and tracked.
- Maintain visibility of sprint commitments, ticket progress, dependencies, risks, blockers, ownership, and delivery confidence.
- Stay close to the detail of the work, including ticket status, acceptance criteria, delivery dates, and open questions.
- Ensure teams are clear on what has been committed, what is at risk, and what action is needed.
- Track progress against agreed plans and proactively escalate slippage, ambiguity, unmanaged dependencies, or changes in scope.
- Support delivery from discovery and refinement through build, test, release, and stakeholder communication.
- Ensure large feature releases are properly planned, tested, communicated, and coordinated across relevant teams.
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TEAM COORDINATION AND ACCOUNTABILITY
- Facilitate effective planning, stand-ups, refinements, retrospectives, showcases, delivery reviews, and other team ceremonies where appropriate.
- Hold teams accountable for following agreed ways of working and delivering against commitments.
- Work with product and engineering leads to balance priorities, capacity, capability, risks, and delivery expectations.
- Help teams maintain a healthy flow of work through backlog refinement, sprint planning, dependency management, and release planning.
- Identify where work is stuck, unclear, over-scoped, under-estimated, or lacking ownership, and drive action to resolve it.
- Support cross-functional squads to collaborate effectively across product, design, engineering, data science, QA, client, and operational functions.
RISK, DEPENDENCY AND STAKEHOLDER MANAGEMENT
- Own and maintain clear visibility of risks, assumptions, issues, and dependencies.
- Identify blockers early and ensure mitigation actions are owned and followed through.
- Manage dependencies across teams, stakeholders, clients, and external partners to support predictable delivery.
- Provide transparent, data-informed updates on project health, milestones, risks, dependencies, and delivery confidence.
- Communicate progress clearly to different audiences, including delivery teams, technical teams, product leaders, senior stakeholders, and clients.
- Manage expectations constructively when scope, timelines, capacity, or priorities need to change
CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT AND DELIVERY MATURITY
- Encourage Lean and Agile ways of working that improve flow, focus, quality, predictability, and team health.
- Use delivery metrics and tooling to improve visibility of what teams are working on and how effectively work is moving through the system.
- Drive improvements in planning, estimation, backlog management, delivery reporting, release coordination, and team operating rhythm.
- Foster a culture of inclusivity, belonging, psychological safety, feedback, and continuous improvement.
- Challenge product, design, engineering, data science, and delivery practices constructively to help teams deliver better outcomes.
- Be an advocate for outcome-led delivery, ensuring teams remain focused on delivering meaningful value rather than simply completing activity.
WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR:
ESSENTIAL EXPERIENCE AND SKILLS
- Proven experience as a Delivery Manager, Project Manager, Scrum Master, or similar role in a software, data, AI, or technology delivery environment.
- Strong understanding of software delivery and the software development lifecycle.
- Demonstrable experience creating and maintaining delivery plans, sprint plans, or equivalent delivery artefacts.
- Demonstrable experience in team capacity and resource planning, ensuring delivery commitments are aligned with available people, skills, and capacity, and proactively identifying resource constraints or gaps.
- Strong ability to manage backlogs, dependencies, risks, blockers, team commitments, and stakeholder expectations.
- Experience working closely with product and engineering teams to move work from discovery or product handover through to delivery.
- Confidence operating at ticket level, with the ability to understand what is being worked on, who owns it, where it is blocked, and when it is expected to be delivered.
- Experience managing delivery in a live product environment, balancing new product development with ongoing maintenance, customer needs, technical debt, and operational priorities.
- Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.
- Strong facilitation skills across planning, stand-ups, retrospectives, showcases, and delivery reviews.
- Experience using delivery tools such as Jira, Confluence, or similar.
- Experience working with Scrum and Kanban in a software/product delivery environment.
- Ability to work under pressure, manage multiple priorities, and bring structure to ambiguous or fast-moving environments.
- A collaborative but assertive style, with the confidence to hold people to account without creating blame.
- A passion for technology, people, and delivering valuable outcomes.
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DESIRABLE EXPERIENCE AND SKILLS
- Experience working in consultancy, agency, enterprise, start-up, scale-up, or client-facing delivery environments.
- Experience delivering AI, data science, optimisation, platform, SaaS, or complex software products.
- Familiarity with Lean, Waterfall, or hybrid delivery approaches.
- Experience with delivery metrics such as velocity, throughput, cycle time, lead time, burndown, predictability, or flow metrics.
- Experience supporting release planning, implementation planning, deployment coordination, and go-live readiness.
- Understanding of technical concepts such as APIs, cloud platforms, CI/CD, testing, environments, observability, data pipelines, or security — enough to support delivery conversations and identify risks.
- Relevant certifications such as CSM, PSM, PMI-ACP, PMP, or equivalent practical experience.
WHAT THIS ROLE IS NOT:
- This is not a purely administrative project management role. You will need to understand the work, the team, the delivery context, and the details that affect whether commitments are credible.
- This is also not primarily an agile coaching role. Coaching teams and improving ways of working are important, but the central requirement is delivery ownership: planning the work, tracking progress, managing risks and dependencies, and ensuring commitments are followed through.
- Nor is this a deeply technical engineering leadership role. You do not need to be a former senior engineer, but you must be able to engage confidently with technical teams, understand the implications of technical uncertainty, and ask the right questions to keep delivery moving.
WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE
In this role, success means:
- Product and client priorities are translated into clear, realistic delivery plans.
- Teams know what they are committing to and why.
- Delivery progress is visible, accurate, and actively managed.
- Risks, blockers, and dependencies are identified early and acted on.
- Stakeholders receive clear, timely, and honest communication.
- Sprint and release plans are credible and maintained.
- Teams are held accountable in a constructive, collaborative way.
- Delivery becomes more predictable over time.
- The team spends less time in ambiguity and more time delivering valuable outcomes.
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