Associate Director, Technical Delivery

Insight Global; Atlanta (GA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

Insight Global is seeking an Associate Director, Technical Delivery to lead a portfolio of delivery pods across client engagements with a focus on production AI systems and profitable delivery.

You will own end-to-end delivery outcomes, staffing strategy, and governance across PODs, while challenging architectural decisions and ensuring IP capture for reusable assets. This is a client-facing leadership role requiring executive collaboration.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of technology delivery experience with AI, data, or cloud-native environments.
• Proven P&L accountability for an AI or technology delivery practice.
• Experience leading Technical Architects, Engagement Leads, or equivalent senior delivery leaders.

Responsibilities

• Own delivery outcomes for a portfolio of 3-4 PODs including velocity, quality, client satisfaction, margin, and reuse of IP.
• Staff and shape POD teams by matching Architects, FDEs, ASAs, and TPMs to engagements.
• Set delivery cadence and operating rhythm; monitor health, scope, and pipeline hiring needs.
• Lead engagement reviews, renewals, and expansion opportunities with client stakeholders.

Skills

AI delivery

P&L accountability

multi-team leadership

executive client relationship

Job description

We are looking for an Associate Director, Technical Delivery to lead a portfolio of delivery pods across client engagements. This is a delivery leadership role for someone who has built and shipped production AI systems, managed P&L accountability, and earned the trust of client executives through outcomes.

As an Associate Director, you own the delivery outcomes for your pod portfolio end-to-end. You set the staffing strategy, manage the Technical Architects and Engagement Leads who run individual PODs, ensure quality and velocity across engagements, and operate as the executive delivery partner for your clients. You make the commercial and technical trade-offs that keep engagements profitable, on track, and expanding. Each POD operates with a Technical Architect, Engagement Lead, Technical Program Manager (TPM), Agentic Systems Analyst (ASA), and Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs); you are the person who ensures those PODs are staffed, performing, and producing reusable IP.

You are not hands-on-keyboard daily, but you are technically credible enough to challenge architectural decisions, evaluate whether Assembly Line configurations are sound, and hold your Technical Architects accountable for both craft and pace. When a POD is underperforming, you step in, diagnose the root cause, and course-correct: reshuffle the team, renegotiate scope, or pair with the Technical Architect to unblock a technical problem. You identify issues in the metrics early and act before they escalate.

You report to the Head of Delivery and are a key voice in practice strategy, hiring decisions, and the evolution of the IG Labs delivery operating model.

What This Role Owns

You are directly accountable for:

• Own delivery outcomes across a portfolio of 3-4 PODs: velocity, quality, client satisfaction, margin, and Reuse Index
• Staff and shape POD teams: match the right Technical Architects, FDEs, ASAs, and TPMs to the right engagements based on problem fit, not just availability
• Set delivery cadence and operating rhythm for the portfolio: standups, demos, retrospectives, escalation paths, and IP capture reviews
• Make commercial trade-offs: balance pod utilization, delivery quality, and margin targets
• Monitor engagement health continuously: catch scope creep, velocity drops, Reuse Index decline, and client dissatisfaction before they surface in steering committees
• Own the wave plan for your portfolio: forecast hiring needs, sequence onboarding, and ensure pods are never under-resourced for committed work
• Manage Technical Architects and Engagement Leads directly: performance reviews, career development, coaching, and accountability for delivery standards and IP capture commitments
• Build the team: own the hiring pipeline for your portfolio; define roles, screen candidates, lead interviews, make offers
• Develop senior FDEs and TPMs into Technical Architect-caliber leaders through stretch assignments, deliberate exposure to client-facing decisions, and progressive ownership of POD-level accountability
• Run the onshore/offshore operating model for your portfolio: ensure offshore teams have context, ownership, and clear handoff discipline, not just task assignments
• Create a culture of ownership, speed, and craft within your pods

Client & Commercial

• Operate as the executive delivery partner for your clients; you own the relationship at the delivery director level
• Lead engagement reviews, QBRs, and commercial conversations with client stakeholders
• Shape SOWs and renewals: translate delivery outcomes into commercial language that justifies expansion
• Identify expansion opportunities from delivery insights: when a data pipeline engagement reveals an agentic workflow opportunity, you surface it, scope it, and staff it
• Partner with Sales to ensure what we sell is what we can deliver; and what we deliver exceeds what we sold

IP & Practice Contribution

• Ensure every POD in your portfolio produces reusable IP: delivery playbooks, Assembly Line templates, architectural patterns, and Factory backlog items. This is a core expectation of the role.
• Contribute to the IG Labs delivery operating model: staffing frameworks, estimation models, quality gates, and escalation protocols
• Drive cross-POD knowledge transfer: patterns that work in one engagement propagate to others through the IP library and structured knowledge transfer
• Partner with the Head of Delivery on practice strategy: which verticals to target, how to structure pods for scale, where to invest in tooling

You are measured on the health and output of your portfolio across these dimensions:

• Delivery margin: actual vs. target margin for each engagement in the portfolio
• Utilization: billable utilization of Technical Architects, FDEs, ASAs, and TPMs across your PODs
• Client satisfaction: NPS or equivalent feedback scores from client stakeholders at the engagement and account level
• Reuse Index: percentage of each engagement powered by pre-built IP from the Factory library
• Velocity and cycle time: sprint-level throughput and lead time across PODs, tracked for continuous improvement
• IP capture rate: Factory backlog items produced per engagement, measured quarterly
• Team retention and development: attrition rate within your portfolio and promotion pipeline for Technical Architect-caliber leaders
• Expansion rate: percentage of engagements that generate follow-on SOWs or scope increases

What This Role Is Not

• Not a project manager. You do not track tasks and report status. You own delivery outcomes, P&L, and the commercial trajectory of a portfolio.
• Not a Technical Architect. The Technical Architect owns system design, architectural governance, and IP patterns. You own the delivery machine that ships those designs into production and the commercial relationship that funds them.
• Not an Engagement Lead. The Engagement Lead owns the client relationship and the commercial terms for a single engagement. You operate across engagements, set portfolio strategy, and make the staffing and commercial trade-offs that no single Engagement Lead can see.
• Not a people manager who happens to oversee delivery. You are a delivery leader who happens to manage people. The delivery outcomes come first; the people leadership exists to produce them.
• Not a role you can do from a dashboard. You will be in client conversations, in POD retrospectives, in hiring panels, and in the room when an underperforming engagement needs to be course-corrected. This is a hands-on leadership role, not an oversight function.

Qualifications

Required

• 12+ years of experience in technology delivery, with at least 5 years leading multi-team portfolios in AI, data, or cloud-native environments
• Deep understanding of agentic AI delivery: you must be conversant in agentic architectures, LLM orchestration patterns, RAG pipelines, Assembly Line design, and the failure modes that kill AI projects in production
• Proven P&L accountability for an AI or technology delivery practice: you have owned margin, utilization, and revenue targets and made the staffing and commercial decisions that drive them
• Track record of managing Technical Architects, Engagement Leads, or equivalent senior delivery leaders across concurrent client engagements
• Executive client relationship experience at the VP or C-level: you have been the delivery face the client trusts to translate technical progress into business outcomes
• Experience building and running POD-based or squad-based delivery models with onshore/offshore teams operating in a follow-the-sun cadence
• Background in professional services, consulting, or systems integration firms delivering AI, data, or platform solutions
• Strong commercial instinct: you understand SOWs, margins, change orders, IP licensing, and how delivery excellence drives account expansion
• Demonstrated ability to build a culture of IP capture and reuse: you have enforced the discipline that turns bespoke client work into reusable assets

Strongly Preferred

• Experience scaling an AI delivery practice from a handful of engineers to 50+ across multiple accounts and geographies
• Hands‑on background in AI/ML engineering earlier in career: you built the systems before you led the teams that build them
• Familiarity with MCP (Model Context Protocol), agent evaluation frameworks, and the tooling ecosystem around agentic systems
• Experience operating delivery models where IP reuse and Factory acceleration are measured KPIs, not aspirational goals
• Track record of developing senior FDEs and TPMs into Technical Architect-caliber delivery leaders
• Experience in regulated industries where AI governance, explainability, and compliance are delivery constraints: financial services, healthcare, insurance
• Prior experience building delivery operating models, estimation frameworks, or staffing playbooks for AI-native organizations from scratch