About Novi

Novi Labs is an AI-driven SaaS company based in Austin, Texas. Our mission is to improve the economic outcomes of energy investments. Novi was founded by industry experts, data scientists, and software engineers to solve a hard problem in oil and gas: turning a huge volume of data into insight people can act on. Our customers include operators, hedge funds, research institutions, royalty buyers and energy investors who together invest hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Novi uses AI and better data to take risk out of those decisions.

 

The Director of Software Delivery position

Our customers plan real capital around what we ship and when. The Director of Software Delivery owns how engineering plans, ships and supports that work, across every team. You’ll set the operating rhythm for four engineering groups in Austin, Calgary and the Netherlands: sizing and sequencing, release cadence, incident reviews, and the dates we give customers. You’ll lead a Technical Project Manager who runs the day-to-day rituals inside the teams, and you’ll coach a group of new engineering managers as they grow into the job. Product sets priorities and writes requirements. Your job is to make sure that what we commit to gets delivered, on the date we said, and that the business can see it happening. This is an in-office leadership role at Novi’s HQ in Austin, TX.

 

Responsibilities

• Own the delivery system across engineering. One list of work in flight, sized before it’s promised and sequenced against real capacity.
• Build and run a weekly release train for our applications, with the checks that make it safe to ship.
• Own the incident process. Every customer-facing issue gets logged with an owner, a cause and a follow-up, and a blameless review that fixes the cause. Partner with Platform Engineering on detection and response.
• Make every customer date traceable. An engineering owner and a plan behind every date a customer hears.
• Run the engineering operating cadence: twice-weekly status, retros that change something, and a monthly delivery scoreboard for the executive team.
• Lead and develop a Technical Project Manager, our scrum expert, who runs standups, planning, sizing and retros inside the teams every day.
• Coach first-time engineering managers on planning, execution and running their teams.
• Partner with Product on intake, scoping and sizing, and with Customer Success on what customers hear and when.
• Coordinate cross-team launches, including bringing acquired products onto one Novi platform.
• Own the tooling behind all of it: Jira workflows, boards and the dashboards the business reads.

 

What success looks like

• The business can plan around engineering dates, and committed vs delivered improves month over month.
• Every customer-facing incident has an owner, a cause and a fix, and repeat incidents go down.
• Teams ship on a steady weekly cadence.
• Every date a customer hears has an engineer’s name on it.
• New managers run their teams’ rhythm without you in the room.

 

Requirements

Experience:

• 8+ years in software delivery, technical program management or engineering management, with 3+ years running delivery across multiple teams.
• Has run agile delivery at scale (scrum, kanban) and knows when process helps and when it’s overhead.
• Built release management and incident management practices from the ground up.
• A technical background. You’re credible with engineers, can follow an architecture discussion and know what a hard problem looks like.
• Measures delivery with real data: flow metrics, DORA, committed vs delivered.
• Has coached managers and led technical project or program managers.
• Direct communicator who can give an executive a straight answer on a date, including when the answer is no.
• Strong Jira skills, and comfortable building the dashboards the business relies on.
• Experience with SaaS and data products, distributed teams, or integrating teams after an acquisition is a plus.
• A player-coach. You’ll run the first retros and plan the first release trains yourself.

 

Education: Bachelor’s or advanced degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Experience level: Director

 

Culture fit

Novi values people who enjoy small, collaborative teams, keep a positive attitude, celebrate shared successes, and move outcomes forward through well-reasoned ideas and clear communication.

 

Benefits

• Professional work environment that understands work/life balance
• Flexible leave policy
• Health, dental and vision insurance
• 401(k)
• Stock options