Manifesto on cord

Manifesto

Delivery Director

External position
Hiring internally for Manifesto?
Design
An agency of creatives and technologists who collaborate with exceptional organisations to change things for the better.
Active
over 6 months ago
Posted
a month ago
Checked
cord regularly checks that external positions are still open
19 hours ago

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Head of Operations
Experience level: Leadership
Core skills considered: Business Analysis, Stakeholder Management
Other skills considered: Project Management, Agile

Logistics

Base salary: £85K - £100K
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid (up to 3 remote days p/w)
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

The Delivery Director is accountable for the delivery operating environment, quality and project execution health of manifesto. This is a senior leadership role created as manifesto grows in scale and complexity, the business requires a senior leader responsible for the delivery performance, operational consistency and client outcomes across the entire agency portfolio.

The role sits at the centre of the agency delivery system, connecting Commercial, Growth, Strategy, Technology, Design and Delivery into a coherent execution model. The Delivery Director is accountable for the environment through which work moves from sale into execution and into outcomes, ensuring programmes, projects, CI and support are properly governed, commercially controlled and delivered in a way that sustains client confidence and long-term relationships.

The role spans significant portfolio breadth, delivery governance and mobilisation, capacity and project workforce alignment, commercial performance against forecast/budget, revenue recognition, risk containment and escalation management. It requires real-time visibility across the health of the agency's entire delivery portfolio and the authority, judgement and presence to act decisively when performance is under pressure.

This role carries accountability for outcomes, not oversight of activity. The Delivery Director is not a layer of governance above delivery. They are the operational leader who removes friction, resolves ambiguity, holds standards and ensures the agency can deliver with consistency and pace at the scale the business demands now and the greater scale it is moving towards. Empowering and working with the senior leaders within the Project Management capability to deliver maximum impact for their portfolios, clients and team.

The Delivery Director provides leadership and intervention where delivery performance, client confidence and commercial outcomes require improvement.

The Delivery Director exists to create delivery transparency and consistency in delivery across this environment. The role works in close partnership with the MD on maintaining delivery performance; Strategy Enablement and Partnerships Director, Strategy team, Head of PMO and Programme Leads on shaping viable, deliverable programmes; the Finance and Commercial Director on delivery execution within commercial frameworks; Technology and Design leadership on quality and capability maturity; and Growth and client services leadership on sales-to-delivery mobilisation, estimation and feasibility. The Delivery Director also works closely with the Engineering Director, who holds delegated ownership for engineering leadership, capability, technical standards and team management.

The effectiveness of this role depends on the quality of these relationships and the clarity of accountability boundaries between growth, client leadership, operational execution and commercial governance.

Responsibilities

  • Delivery execution, governance and operational health across portfolios
  • Sales-to-delivery mobilisation and delivery lifecycle management
  • Delivery execution against agreed commercial budgets and operational plans
  • Effective deployment of delivery capability against client requirement including management of near shore agreements
  • Project and programme profitability/performance against agreed commercial parameters
  • Supporting accurate forecasting and revenue reporting through on time and on budget delivery performance
  • Client satisfaction and long-term retention through delivery excellence
  • Risk containment, escalation management and delivery recovery
  • Leadership, coaching and support for the project and programme management leaders and team
  • Delivery standards, maturity and continuous improvement ensuring AI, automations and process improvements are implemented effectively

Commercial accountability

The Delivery Director carries direct commercial accountability for project and programme delivery performance. The role owns revenue performance and recognition against budget and forecast, and is accountable for ensuring projects and programmes can be and are delivered in a commercially sustainable way with senior project and programme management leaders that aligns with agreed margin assumptions.

This encompasses project and programme profitability, delivery margin management, scope containment, operational forecasting accuracy and the early surfacing of margin leakage, delivery risk and forecasting issues.

The Delivery Director works in close partnership with the Finance and Commercial Director, who owns financial reporting integrity, pricing governance, systems architecture, commercial MI, margin analysis frameworks and forecasting governance. The Finance and Commercial Director governs the commercial operating framework; the Delivery Director is accountable for operational execution and performance within it. This distinction is deliberate and essential to maintaining clear ownership boundaries while enabling close operational collaboration.

Delivery performance and client confidence

The Delivery Director is accountable for client confidence across delivery, not simply project completion. The operational environment must consistently produce work that clients trust, value and want to continue investing in.

  • Delivery quality is consistent and reliable across all programmes
  • Communication is proactive and transparent at every stage
  • Risks are surfaced early and managed with rigour
  • The delivery experience reflects the strategic ambition of the work
  • Teams operate with clear accountability and ownership
  • Projects convert into long-term relationships, retained revenue and reputation growth

Delivery quality directly drives client retention, account growth, referrals and commercial sustainability. Operational excellence is a strategic growth driver. This role also owns containment: in pressured environments, the Delivery Director creates clarity, pace and decision-making discipline. Ambiguity, escalation drift and delivery instability stop here.

Workforce, capacity and delivery leadership

The Delivery Director owns the operational alignment between demand and delivery capability. This extends beyond resource allocation to encompass future project capacity planning, delivery resilience, utilisation health, project and programme management succession risk and planning.

The role is accountable for ensuring the agency has the following:

  • The right people aligned to the right work at the right time
  • Gaps in skills and capabilities needed for project and programme delivery is identified with the Project and Programme Leadership team
  • Sufficient operational capacity to deliver the portfolio sustainably
  • Strong delivery leadership within programmes and projects
  • Healthy escalation and decision-making structures
  • Operational clarity across multidisciplinary teams

The role operates within the capacity planning, utilisation frameworks and reporting structures governed by the Finance and Commercial Director. As the PSA implementation matures, operational resourcing and digital production responsibilities could evolve further into the Delivery Director function.

Delivery maturity and operational evolution

The Delivery Director is responsible for continuously improving delivery practices, governance, embedding operational standards, sharpening escalation clarity, developing project and programme leadership capability and progression. The goal is an agency that delivers at pace without losing quality, predictability or commercial discipline. The Delivery Director is responsible for supporting the agency and the project and programme management team in getting it there and keeping it there.

Leadership expectations

This role is not a functional delivery lead. This is a senior leadership role operating across the agency and working closely with Executive Leadership. The Delivery Director must be equally at home with c-suite clients as in the operational detail of complex programmes.

This requires someone who holds live operational detail and strategic context simultaneously, balances client satisfaction with commercial sustainability and maintains pace without sacrificing quality. They build trust across disciplines, challenge constructively at peer level and make sound decisions in complex, ambiguous environments without creating dependency.

Operational judgement, emotional intelligence and organisational credibility are prerequisites, not differentiators.

This role is a new investment for manifesto, and the successful candidate the opportunity to shape the role and value for the business but most importantly our clients.

Responsibilities

  • Responsible for delivering/realising £12m revenue to agreed GM. Responsible for delivery team headcount budget
  • Complex role with accountability for delivery performance coordinating multiple concurrent client programmes through multidisciplinary teams spanning delivery, engineering, design, strategy, commercial, finance and nearshore partners. The role operates across a

Company Benefits

We’ve tried to create the type of environment we’d all love to work in, and our consistent growth is testament to that. We promote professional development, with a number of benefits alongside your salary (and 5% matched pension), including but not limited to:

  • Personal training and development budget
  • Time set aside to innovate
  • Top of the range laptop of your choice
  • Free fruit and toast (a digital agency marches on its toast)
  • Weekly social events like 5-a-side football, pottery class, book club etc
  • All the goodies you’d expect from a Shoreditch agency: beer fridge, ping pong, Subbuteo, swegway, cinema room…
  • Travel to work/Bike scheme
  • Childcare vouchers
  • Season ticket loans
You’ll also benefit from a strong team culture with regular social events, learning opportunities, team days and lunches.
Delivery Director at Manifesto
Position posted a month ago

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Starling Bank on cord

Starling Bank

Full Stack Engineer (ML Ops)

London, UK
FinTech · Banking · Finance
A better bank for everyone
Active
over 6 months ago
Responds to
0% of requests
Responds in
1h 55m
Requests
7 pending

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Full Stack
Experience level: Mid, Senior
Core skills considered: Java, React, Redux, AWS, JavaScript

Logistics

Base salary: £70K - £110K
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid (up to 2 remote days p/w)
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! Our vision is fast technology, fair service, and honest values. All at the tap of a phone, all the time.

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! We built a new kind of bank because we knew technology had the power to help people save, spend and manage their money in a new and transformative way.

We’re a fully licensed UK bank with the culture and spirit of a fast-moving, disruptive tech company. We’re a bank, but better: fairer, easier to use and designed to demystify money for everyone. We employ more than 3,000 people across our London, Southampton, Cardiff and Manchester offices.

Our technologists are at the very heart of Starling and enjoy working in a fast-paced environment that is all about building things, creating new stuff, and disruptive technology that keeps us on the cutting edge of fintech. We operate a flat structure to empower you to make decisions regardless of what your primary responsibilities may be, innovation and collaboration will be at the core of everything you do. Help is never far away in our open culture, you will find support in your team and from across the business, we are in this together!

The way to thrive and shine within Starling is to be a self-driven individual and be able to take full ownership of everything around you: From building things, designing, discovering, to sharing knowledge with your colleagues and making sure all processes are efficient and productive to deliver the best possible results for our customers. Our purpose is underpinned by five Starling values: Listen, Keep It Simple, Do The Right Thing, Own It, and Aim For Greatness.

Hybrid Working

We have a Hybrid approach to working here at Starling - our preference is that you're located within a commutable distance of one of our offices so that we're able to interact and collaborate in person. We don't like to mandate how much you visit the office and work from home, that's to be agreed upon between you and your manager.

Our Data Environment

Our Data teams are excited about the value of data within the business, powers our product decisions to improve things for our customers and enhance effective and agile decision making, regardless of what their primary tech stack may be. Hear from the team in our latest blogs or our case studies with Women in Tech.

We are looking for talented data professionals at all levels to join the team. We value people being engaged and caring about customers, caring about the code they write and the contribution they make to Starling. People with a broad ability to apply themselves to a multitude of problems and challenges, who can work across teams do great things here at Starling, to continue changing banking for good.

Requirements

We have built our entire banking platform in house and mostly in Java. We are looking for people who want to work on building the tooling that is used by our engineers on a daily basis.

We are looking for people who are truly full stack, and are as comfortable polishing their javascript front end as they are debugging the innards of their java applications database interactions, or standing up infrastructure with terraform. We are looking for people who can:

  • Design REST apis.
  • Code backend services, ideally using Java, or another other server side compiled language.
  • Develop modern front ends, ideally using React and Redux.
  • Get their code into the cloud and support it there, ideally on AWS.
  • Believe in clean coding, simple solutions, automated testing and continuous deployment.
  • Like to take ownership of a feature from the original idea through to live.
  • Think (like us) that a small number of empowered developers is the right way to deliver software.

Company Benefits

  • 33 days holiday (including flexible bank holidays)
  • An extra day’s holiday for your birthday
  • 16 hours paid volunteering time a year
  • Part-time and/or flexible hours available for most roles
  • Salary sacrifice, company enhanced pension scheme
  • Life insurance at 4x your salary
  • Hybrid/remote working
  • Private Medical Insurance with VitalityHealth including mental health support and cancer care. Partner benefits include discounts with Waitrose, Mr&Mrs Smith and Peloton
  • Generous family-friendly policies
  • Varied social groups set up and run by our employees
  • Perkbox membership giving access to retail discounts, a wellness platform for physical and mental health, and weekly free and boosted perks
  • Access to initiatives like Cycle to Work, Salary Sacrificed Gym partnerships and Electric Vehicle (EV) leasing

Full details are available on our careers site

Interview Process

Interviewing is a two way process and we want you to have the time and opportunity to get to know us, as much as we are getting to know you! Our interviews are conversational and we want to get the best from you, so come with questions and be curious. In general you can expect the below, following a chat with one of our Talent Team:

  • Stage 1 - 30 mins with one of the team
  • Stage 2 - Take home challenge
  • Stage 3 - 90 mins technical interview with two team members
  • Stage 3 - 45 min final with an executive and a member of the people team
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Message Alex Yeates at Starling Bank
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