Delivery Lead

Rise8 builds custom, secure software for government organizations, measuring success by impact: lives saved, time returned, and missions advanced. 

We think big, start small, and scale fast with elite teams across product, design, and engineering to drive continuous delivery for critical missions.

We believe customer experience starts with employee experience, so we take care of our employees. Rise8 is where you’ll do the best work of your career—supported by a culture you won’t find anywhere else. We offer competitive pay and benefits, but what sets us apart is our commitment to autonomy, growth, and a culture rooted in kindness, candor, and continuous learning. 

Certified as a Great Place to Work®, with 100% of employees saying they love working here, Rise8 is where bold ideas become real capabilities. Where mission meets meaning. And where fewer bad things happen because of bad software.

• You want to make tomorrow better than today. 
• You have a passion for high-speed security and you care about risk management over compliance.
• You believe the biggest vulnerability in any system is time. You live to securely reduce cycle time.
• You enjoy daily decision making and real product delivery.
• You help ensure project success and client satisfaction. 
• You enjoy collaborative teams, pairing with team members, and inviting your clients to participate. 
• You like to work alongside, and learn from, lean and agile leaders. 
• You are a creative problem solver who is comfortable with uncertainty.
• You’re a curious and keen learner who thrives on enhancing your (and our) practices and knowledge.
• You see AI as a force multiplier, not a shortcut — and you're already weaving it into how you think, build, and ship.

Own end-to-end delivery and portfolio-level outcomes for the collective of projects in your domain. You will set the delivery standard, partner tightly with senior customers and a Customer Success Manager, and translate portfolio vision into outcome-oriented roadmaps that drive production impact. This is a senior, hands-on leadership role that combines performance management ownership, people leadership/inspiration/accountability, stakeholder management, and rigorous delivery execution.

• Set the standard for A-Player, delivery-accountable leadership across the portfolio.
• Create portfolio vision & outcome-oriented roadmap directly with senior-level customers, supported with a Customer Success Manager.
• Ensure portfolio roadmaps integrate and trace to team-level roadmaps; enable decision points that maximize outcomes in production.
• Track daily progress across teams and maintain transparent reporting of key delivery metrics to leadership.
• Own allocation decisions to optimize team and portfolio outcomes.
• Manage performance for Risers in the portfolio: coach, assess, and make employment decisions when necessary.
• Identify training gaps and radiate needs to the Enablement department; partner with Enablement on remediation and ramp plans.
• Source cross-functional support from other Rise8 departments to remediate portfolio issues.
• Surface and escalate risks and “yellow flags” early and without hesitation.
• Facilitate governance cadence (portfolio reviews, release planning, executive briefings).
• Drive continuous improvement in delivery practices, gitops tooling hygiene , and measurement.
• Lead and inspire your teams to delivery success; figuring out what makes them tick and aligning incentives to excite the teams’ performance, down to each Riser as applicable.
• Champion AI-augmented ways of working across your portfolio, helping Risers leverage AI tooling to accelerate delivery, reduce cycle time, and drive better outcomes at scale.

• 8+ years of hands-on delivery/program leadership for software development teams, with a track record of owning delivery outcomes and budgets.
• Demonstrated experience building and managing portfolio- or program-level outcome roadmaps that map to team-level plans.
• Strong budget literacy: forecasting, variance analysis, and investment/divestment recommendations.
• Proven stakeholder management at senior customer levels and experience partnering with Customer Success Managers.
• Experience with Agile/Lean delivery practices and common tooling (GitLab/Jira/Confluence) and metrics-driven delivery (lead time, cycle time, deployment frequency, throughput).
• Demonstrated people leadership: performance management, allocation decisions, coaching, and hiring input.
• Excellent written and verbal communication — comfortable briefing executives and program offices.
• Comfortable in a fast-moving remote environment and managing ambiguity.
• U.S. citizen or eligible to obtain required clearance; willing to be clearable for DoD Secret.

• Prior  military or federal civilian program experience (understanding defense sector stakeholder structures and procurement) — strongly preferred.
• Familiarity with CUI handling, DD254 execution, CMMC L2, and NIST SP 800-171 controls.
• Experience with CI/CD, cloud-native deployments, and observability/telemetry tooling.
• Prior experience managing multiple delivery teams or a delivery portfolio.
• Hands-on experience building with AI and integrating it into product and engineering workflows across cross-functional teams.
• Security clearance (active Secret or higher) is a plus.
• Certifications such as PMP, SAFe, or equivalent delivery/PMO credentials.

The annual salary range for this role as it is posted is $190,000 to $225,000 regardless of final candidate location within the United States. The final job level and annual salary will be determined based on the education, qualification, knowledge, skills, ability, and experience of the final candidate(s), and calibrated against relevant market data and internal team equity.