AI-Powered Platform Delivery Team Lead

Element451 is building the AI-powered platform reshaping how colleges and universities recruit, enroll, and support their students - and delivery is how that platform reaches the institutions that run on it. This is a rare chance to lead a focused engineering team and still keep your hands in the work: own the delivery, build and grow the people, and stay close enough to the code to make real technical calls. If you became a leader because you love building and you don’t want to stop - you’ll feel at home here.

The Role

You’ll lead one of our delivery teams - Bolt or CRM and own what it ships. You’ll manage a team of up to eight engineers and be accountable for its delivery end to end: velocity, predictability, and quality, from planning until working software is live in production. This is deliberately a Team Lead role, not a hands-off manager role. It’s a player-coach job that flexes with team size: while the team is small, you’re expected to be genuinely hands-on — engaging in technical challenges, reviewing PRs, and joining incident response — and as the team grows toward full size, that hands-on share shifts toward leadership. The role reports into senior engineering leadership and sits a level below our Director, Engineering scope, with real ownership of a single team rather than a department.

It’s also an explicitly AI-forward role. We expect you to use AI aggressively and intelligently across the full development lifecycle, to drive that behavior on your team, and to hold AI-assisted work to the same bar as anything written by hand. This is a remote role based in Serbia.

What You’ll Own

You own your team’s delivery outcomes - not just that work gets written, but that it gets shipped, stays healthy, and the people doing it keep getting better. In practice, you:

• Product owns problem prioritization and desired outcomes. The Team Lead owns team capacity, delivery commitments, execution, and release readiness. Senior and Principal Engineers provide technical direction and own architecture within their defined scope.

• Own your team’s delivery end to end — velocity, predictability, and quality — from cycle planning until working software is in production, not merged or sitting in staging.

• Lead, coach, and grow a team of three to eight engineers — regular 1:1s, actionable feedback, honest career development, hiring, and addressing underperformance early and directly.

• Own team-level cycle shaping and planning — size and scope work to a deliverable cycle boundary, ground commitments in honest engineering analysis, and represent your team’s capacity and constraints to Product before anything is agreed to.

• Stay hands-on where it counts, especially while the team is small — engage in technical challenges, review PRs on high-risk and high-signal work, and join incident response. This is heaviest at small scale and trends toward leadership as the team reaches full size.

• Reinforce the technical standards owned by your senior and principal engineers — hold the team accountable to code quality, review thoroughness, testing, and sound architecture, and create the conditions for those standards to be applied consistently rather than only under pressure.

• Own release health for your team — “done” means in production. Drive completed work to release and remove the organizational and process blockers that delay deployment.

• Own the engineering–QA contract for your team — when QA engages in the cycle, what a ready handoff from engineering looks like, and what quality gates must clear before a release.

• Drive AI adoption as a delivery lever — continuously find where AI can remove constraints across the SDLC, pilot tooling, and measure impact against delivery outcomes.

• Partner across Product, Design, and the rest of Engineering — surface delivery status, risk, and resourcing needs early and credibly. No surprises.

How You’ll Show Up

We hire for behavior as much as for experience. We’re looking for someone who:

• Lives our values, and builds team culture through behavior, not policy.

• Is excellent by default — visibly unsatisfied with mediocre outcomes, without ruling through fear.

• Leads as a player-coach — willing to go hands-on when the team needs it, and to step back as it grows.

• Leads with service — removes obstacles for the team rather than managing around them.

• Puts the team first — builds cohesion, celebrates collective wins, and addresses friction before it compounds.

• Communicates with clarity and honesty — delivers hard feedback, escalates hard problems, and advocates for the team.

• Treats feedback as a gift, and gives it to the team generously and well.

What You Bring

• 6+ years of professional software engineering in a complex, multi-tenant SaaS product, including meaningful hands-on technical work.

• 1+ year leading engineers — as a manager, tech lead, or team lead. This can be your first formal management role, but you’ve owned outcomes through other people before.

• Enough technical depth in our stack — PHP/Laravel , TypeScript (NestJS/Angular) , MongoDB , AWS — to engage substantively in architecture discussions, review PRs, and make sound trade-off calls.

• A track record of delivering — owning velocity, predictability, and quality for a team or significant scope, all the way through to production.

• Comfort operating within a cycle-based product development methodology; familiarity with Shape Up or a comparable approach is a plus.

• A genuine commitment to building an AI-forward team. We’re a Cursor shop; Claude Code, Codex, or comparable tools are equally valued.

• Strong communication at both the engineering-detail and leadership-summary levels — effective in 1:1s, team retrospectives, and leadership reviews alike.

Our Values

• Impactful not Immediate - We prioritize and invest in initiatives that will be most impactful.

• Progress before Perfection - We are action-oriented people. We are empowered to make decisions and achieve our goals.

• Learners before Masters - We are curious and humble people who strive to constantly improve.

• Together not Alone - We rally behind each other and pitch in to support the greater whole.

• Customer Success not Support - We solve partner goals and prioritize their success.