Product Delivery Lead

Product Delivery Lead

Job Posted - 06/02/2026

• Employment Type: Full-time
• Role: Product Delivery Lead (Engineering) — Founding / First Delivery Hire
• Level: Individual Contributor with strong cross-functional influence
• Team: Engineering (reporting to CTO)
• Impact: High-impact role in a scaling startup (~10 → 20 engineers)

About Operata

Operata is the CX Observability platform for the AI-enabled contact center. In a fractured landscape of CCaaS platforms, Voice AI agents, and BPOs, Operata shines a light into the real-time customer experience by harmonizing technical, operational, and experience data into a clear map for IT and Operations teams. Headquartered in Denver, Colorado and Melbourne, Australia.

Bringing Observability to Customer Experience

Operating a consistently high-performing cloud contact center is now a mission-critical requirement for modern enterprises. Yet the technical complexity and fragmentation of today's digital customer experience create significant challenges for contact center operations and IT teams.

From network, browser, and headset failures to BPO performance issues and opaque AI systems, countless factors degrade customer interactions—many of which sit outside the visibility and control of even the most experienced teams.

As the world's first CX observability platform, Operata brings clarity to this complexity. By unifying technical, operational, and experience data across fragmented but interconnected systems, Operata exposes patterns that allow enterprises to diagnose issues faster, resolve them more effectively, and proactively improve every customer interaction in real time.

Often described as the "Datadog for Contact Centers," Operata enables enterprises to move from reactive firefighting to proactive CX optimisation.

Our vision is to put "people experience" at the heart of communications.

With Operata, enterprises gain the insight, intelligence, and control needed to operate resilient, high-performing contact centers and deliver truly connected customer experiences at scale.

About the role

Are you someone who makes delivery happen—not by owning it alone, but by enabling teams to ship with clarity, coordination, and confidence?

At Operata, delivery is everyone’s job. Engineers, product managers, and leadership all share accountability for shipping what we commit to. But shared accountability only works when someone ensures the system functions—that dependencies are tracked, risks are surfaced early, teams are aligned, and nothing falls through the cracks.

This role is about building a delivery capability that the whole team can rely on. You will be the connective tissue between Product, Engineering, and GTM—creating the visibility, coordination, and rhythm that enables everyone to deliver on their commitments.

You will also help us evolve. We currently operate in a project-based delivery model with 10-week cycles and committed dates. This was a deliberate choice to bring predictability while we scale. Your mandate includes helping us mature toward a more agile delivery model over time—not by imposing frameworks, but by building the delivery muscle, practices, and trust that make continuous delivery possible.

Why This Role Exists

We are a growing startup with ~10 engineers today and plans to scale significantly over the next 12 months. Until now, delivery coordination has been a shared responsibility—handled by the CTO, engineering leads, and product managers in an ad-hoc fashion.

This has worked, but it doesn’t scale. When delivery breaks today, no one owns the problem. Dependencies slip. Risks surface late. Stakeholders are surprised.

We are hiring our first Product Delivery Lead to own the delivery coordination function—so our CTO can focus on engineering outcomes, our Principal Engineer can focus on technical excellence, and our Product team can focus on what we build rather than chasing status.

The ambition: Start by stabilising delivery in our current project-based model. Then, as we build capability and trust, help us transition to a more agile, continuous delivery approach where teams can ship with confidence and speed.

How you will make an impact

You will:

• Enable delivery across engineering initiatives by ensuring teams have clarity on scope, dependencies, and timelines
• Drive cross-functional coordination between Product, Engineering, and GTM
• Surface and mitigate delivery risks early—before they become surprises
• Clarify requirements and write specifications when needed to unblock teams
• Track progress and provide clear, accurate visibility to leadership and stakeholders
• Facilitate scope/schedule trade-off conversations with data, not opinions
• Escalate blockers and help resolve dependency conflicts between teams
• Run retrospectives that drive real improvement, not just venting
• Build the lightweight processes and rituals that make delivery predictable
• Over time, help evolve our delivery practices from project-based cycles toward agile continuous delivery

What You Will Own

You will have real ownership over delivery coordination and the systems that make delivery predictable. Specifically, you will own:

• Delivery coordination for engineering initiatives—ensuring teams have what they need to hit their commitments
• Project plans, schedules, and milestone tracking
• Requirements clarification and specification writing when needed to unblock delivery
• Risk identification, escalation, and mitigation tracking
• Cross-functional coordination between Engineering, Product, and GTM
• Dependency mapping and management (internal and external)
• Progress reporting and delivery visibility for leadership
• Retrospectives and continuous improvement of delivery practices
• The evolution of our delivery model from project-based toward agile

To be clear: The whole team owns delivery outcomes. Engineers own their commitments. Product owns scope and priorities. You own the coordination layer that makes it all work together.

You will not own technical decisions, architecture, or engineering team management—those sit with the Principal Engineer and CTO.

What This Role Is NOT

We want to be clear about emphasis, not create false boundaries:

• ❌ Not a traditional PMO / waterfall project manager — we don’t need someone who adds administrative overhead or enforces rigid processes that slow teams down
• ❌ Not a Jira administrator — tool hygiene matters, but your value isn’t measured in backlog cleanliness
• ❌ Not a substitute for team accountability — delivery is everyone’s job; you enable it, you don’t own it alone

The balance that matters: You will do requirements clarification, write specs when needed, and maintain delivery artefacts. That’s part of the job. But this work serves delivery—it’s not the core function of the role. We need someone who ensures we ship, not someone who produces perfect documentation about why we didn’t.

Constraints and Context

We believe being explicit about constraints leads to better outcomes:

• We currently operate in project cycles with committed drop dates
• We’ve deliberately chosen a project-based model while we scale—predictability matters right now
• The ambition is to evolve toward agile continuous delivery as we build capability
• Engineering is ~10 people today, growing to ~20 in the next 12 months
• The CTO is accountable for delivery outcomes; you are responsible for delivery execution
• Product owns what we build and why; you own how we coordinate and track delivery
• We’re a globally distributed team (Melbourne, Denver, remote)—async communication matters
• We have enterprise customers with real commitments—missing dates has consequences

These constraints are explicit by design—we expect our delivery model to evolve as the organisation matures.

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What Success Looks Like

In your first 6–12 months, success will look like:

• Predictable delivery—teams ship what they commit to, when they commit to it
• Risks surfaced early—no surprises in the final weeks of a cycle
• Clear visibility for CTO, Product, and GTM into delivery progress
• Requirements and specs that unblock teams rather than slow them down
• Reduced coordination overhead for engineers and engineering leads
• Retrospectives that drive measurable improvement
• A credible path toward evolving our delivery practices

Failure would look like:

• Teams consistently missing dates without early warning
• Engineers feeling buried in process overhead or unnecessary documentation
• Stakeholders surprised by delivery outcomes
• The role becoming disconnected from actual delivery—producing artefacts nobody uses
• Teams routing around the delivery process to get things don

Reporting and Relationships

Reports to: CTO (John Mitchem)
Team: Engineering

While this role works across Product, Engineering, and GTM daily, it is based within the Engineering function. The title reflects a focus on product delivery outcomes; the reporting line reflects where delivery coordination needs to be anchored.

Key Relationships

• CTO — You report delivery status, escalate risks, and support scope/schedule trade-off decisions
• CPO — Alignment on scope, priorities, and what “done” means for customers
• Principal Engineer (Manoj) — Collaboration on feasibility, estimates, and capacity
• Principal Engineer, Observability & Developer Experience (Yann) — Alignment on developer experience and tooling
• GTM — Visibility into delivery timelines for customer and partner commitments

Why this sits in Engineering: Delivery bottlenecks are currently engineering-centric. This role needs proximity to engineering execution and authority to coordinate across engineering workstreams. Reporting to the CTO ensures the Product Delivery Lead has the organisational position to drive alignment across teams.

Authority

This role will be empowered to:

• Escalate blockers to the CTO and leadership when delivery is at risk
• Facilitate prioritisation decisions when competing demands create conflict
• Surface dependency issues and drive resolution across teams
• Flag scope changes that threaten committed timelines
• Call out when commitments are slipping and help teams course-correct

Delivery is everyone’s accountability—this role ensures the system works. We are committed to giving this role the organisational support and backing it needs to be effective.

Role Scope and Growth

• This is an individual contributor role with significant cross-functional influence
• You will work closely with the CTO to shape delivery practices and the evolution toward agile
• Over time, this role may grow into leading a delivery/program function as the company scales
• You will have autonomy to build the practices that work for our context—not impose frameworks from elsewhere

Qualifications

You’ll likely bring experience in several of the following areas:

• Enabling delivery in a software environment—coordinating across teams to ship on time
• Business analysis and requirements work—clarifying scope, writing specs, bridging product and engineering
• Working closely with engineering teams—you understand how software gets built
• Agile practices in real-world settings—experience helping teams improve delivery
• Cross-functional coordination between engineering, product, and commercial teams
• Risk identification—spotting delivery risks early and helping teams mitigate them
• Navigating ambiguity in a startup or scale-up environment where process must stay lightweight
• Clear communication, especially for status reporting and facilitating difficult trade-off conversations

You should be technical enough to:

• Understand when an estimate feels off and ask the right questions
• Follow a technical conversation, even if you can’t contribute code
• Recognise scope creep disguised as “technical debt” or “refactoring”
• Know what an external dependency means for delivery risk
• Not get steamrolled by “it’s complicated”

You don’t need to:

• Write code or review pull requests
• Make architectural decisions
• Be a former software engineer (though it helps)

Judgement, ownership, and delivery instincts matter more than ticking every box.

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Additional Information

At Operata, we embrace inclusion and diversity. We believe in work/life balance and bringing our true selves to work. To that end, we offer best-in-class flexibility that supports our Operatas along their career journey with us.

For us, better connection is something we live—with our people, customers, partners and our team. It’s reflected in our 8 core values:

• Execute the why. Grow with purpose.
• Play the long game. Build respect, value relationships.
• Progress over perfection. Act and iterate.
• Be fearless. Be empowered to innovate without fear.
• We’re customers too. We solve the problems we have.
• Impress yourself. Do it because you think it is valuable.
• Leave it better than we found it. Use our knowledge to do some good.
• Be thoughtful. Think first, empathise, consider our impact.

Read more about our culture and values at: operata.com/our-story

Operata is an equal opportunity employer and makes employment decisions on the basis of merit.  Operata prohibits discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, sexual identity, gender identity, marital status, veteran status, nationality, citizenship, age, disability, medical condition, pregnancy, or any other unlawful consideration. 

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