Director of Delivery Operations

About the role:

Code for America works across a portfolio of complex, high-stakes projects — from products to technology-enabled advisory services — all aimed at helping millions of people access critical government benefits and services. As our portfolio grows and the demands on our government partners intensify, the consistency and discipline of how we deliver matters as much as what we deliver.

The Director of Delivery Operations will build and steward the systems, standards, and practices that make our project delivery excellent and repeatable. This is an internal-facing, enabling role: you won't manage individual projects directly, but you'll shape how every Safety Net advisory project runs — from the moment a partnership is handed off from cultivation through to project close. You'll work closely with Program Directors, Project Sponsors, and key project and discipline leaders to embed practical delivery practices into day-to-day work, and you'll partner with senior program leadership to ensure our operating model stays grounded in what actually works in the field.

This is a new role at Code for America, and the person who takes it on will have real strategic ownership — setting the priorities for how we invest in delivery infrastructure, making deliberate tradeoffs about where to standardize versus where to leave room for project-specific judgment, and bringing the best of delivery practice, AI-enabled tools and capabilities, and human-centered approaches to improving government services to keep Code for America at the leading edge of how this work gets done.

This role will report to the Senior Director of Safety Net and is expected to travel no more than 15% of the time.

Code for America is based in California and can employ those who reside full-time within the United States. This is a remote position.

In this position you will:

• Delivery Standards & Practice Ownership
  • Own and continuously improve Code for America's delivery methodology, including project management standards, tools, templates, playbooks, and governance frameworks
  • Set and drive strategic priorities for delivery infrastructure investment in alignment with senior leaders — uplifting explicit tradeoffs about where standardization adds the most value and where over-prescribing would create friction rather than consistency ⁠— while bringing leaders and project teams along.
  • Design and maintain protocols for the full project lifecycle: information handoffs from the Partnerships team at cultivation close, project kickoff facilitation and team onboarding, scope revision processes, and project close-out.
  • Collaborate with product operations to leverage learnings and best practices for common processes across product and advisory work.
  • Own and administer delivery tooling (e.g., Asana, Airtable), including how it's configured, how projects are structured within it, and how it supports visibility into project effectiveness across the portfolio
  • Maintain a living library of easy-to-use delivery resources — templates, how-to guides, playbooks — that teams can access and apply without reinventing the wheel
  • Identify and integrate AI tools into delivery workflows where they can meaningfully improve consistency, efficiency, or quality of execution, modeling responsible adoption for the broader team
• Coaching, Adoption & Change Management
  • Note: The Director of Delivery Operations role is a people management role, but it is not expected to have direct reports initially. This role may eventually support in growing out a team, adopting direct reports as management needs evolve.
  • Provide day-to-day support to project leaders to ensure delivery standards are understood and consistently applied across their projects
  • Roll out training, tools & resources, and onboarding support to build project management capability across program teams
  • Drive adoption of delivery standards through intentional change management — not just defining the practices, but creating the conditions for people to use them consistently
  • Anticipate any resistance to new delivery practices before it surfaces, and work to understand and address it proactively, rather than waiting for adoption to stall
  • Design and facilitate feedback loops — through quality assurance reviews, retrospectives, and structured check-ins — that surface what's working and what needs to evolve
  • Identify patterns across projects (recurring risks, scope issues, handoff breakdowns) and translate them into updated guidance and coaching
• Project Support & Scope Management
  • Ensure strong communication and feedback loops with project teams to track delivery effectiveness, surface emerging risks, and provide hands-on support when projects need to course-correct from a project management perspective.
  • Support scope revision processes from a project management perspective, helping teams manage and reset expectations in a structured way — partnering closely with leaders across disciplines throughout.
  • Partner with the Partnerships team to ensure smooth handoffs at the transition from cultivation to delivery, with clear shared accountability and no loss of critical context.
• Governance & Portfolio Visibility
  • Continually assess effectiveness and efficiency of existing and new governance mechanisms, including regular project check-ins, reporting, and communication processes that give senior leadership timely visibility into project status, risks, and delivery effectiveness across the portfolio. Recommend and implement changes to improve them.
  • Track adoption of delivery standards across projects and flag gaps proactively
  • Support Program Directors in preparing for project reviews and escalations with consistent, well-structured information
  • Partner with senior program leadership to ensure delivery operations stay aligned with evolving program priorities and organizational strategy
  • Anticipate systemic challenges across the portfolio before they become blockers, and develop solutions that address root causes rather than individual project symptoms
• Other duties as assigned
  • Engage in ad hoc projects and initiatives as required by the organization's evolving needs.

About you:

This position is a great fit for an experienced delivery professional who thrives in an enabling and coaching role — someone who gets energy from building systems that help others succeed, who knows the importance of defining a standard, and who has the strategic instincts to set priorities, make tradeoffs, and bring people along through change.

• 8+ years of experience in project management, delivery operations, or a PMO function, ideally within a digital services, consulting, government, or related civic technology organization
• Demonstrated experience designing and implementing delivery frameworks, standards, or playbooks
• Demonstrated ability to set priorities across a delivery domain — deciding where to invest in standardization, where to leave flexibility, and how to communicate those tradeoffs to senior stakeholders
• Strong coaching and change management skills, with a track record of driving adoption of new practices across teams and anticipating resistance before it becomes a blocker
• Ability to learn fast, act with conviction, and stay open to feedback — you don't need perfect information to move, and are open to making adjustments as you learn more.
• Experience facilitating project kickoffs and structuring handoff processes between teams or functions
• Deep familiarity with project and delivery management tools (e.g., Asana, Airtable, Jira, Smartsheet) and the ability to configure and support broad adoption
• Experience identifying and integrating AI tools into delivery or project management workflows, with a practical and responsible approach to doing so
• Experience supporting a portfolio of concurrent projects, with the ability to spot systemic delivery risks and support course-correction across programs
• Comfort working in a highly collaborative, cross-functional environment where influence matters more than authority — particularly in close partnership with product, partnerships, and program functions
• Experience navigating scope changes, escalations, and shifting partner expectations in complex, multi-stakeholder projects
• Curiosity about emerging AI tools and a commitment to using them responsibly and effectively
• A deep commitment to Code for America's mission of making government services work well for the people who need them most

It’s a bonus if you have:

• Experience working in civic tech, government services, or public sector delivery contexts
• Familiarity with human-centered design or agile delivery methodologies as practiced in digital government work
• Experience building delivery operations functions from scratch in a growing or scaling organization
• Background working with or alongside government partners (state agencies, federal programs)
• Experience developing training curricula or facilitating communities of practice around delivery or project management