POD Captain

POD Captain

Dubai

Role:

• Delivery velocity: Ship production solutions on schedule with zero defects
• POD health: Eliminate silos, resolve blockers within 4 hours, ensure daily flow
• Client satisfaction: Single throat to client; manage scope, expectations, handoff timing
• Team capability: Grow engineers, remove friction, build shared expertise across stack
• Budget/Resource: Own POD cost centre, hiring decisions, tool/infra investments

Delivery & Velocity

• Translate client discovery into iterative delivery roadmap; define 2-week sprint goals aligned to business milestones
• Drive daily 15-min POD standups; unblock dependencies same-day
• Own sprint planning, backlog grooming, and velocity tracking; target 40-point sprints with 85%+ commitment accuracy
• Conduct bi-weekly release planning; coordinate deployment windows with client, FDE, QA and platform teams
• Track and communicate burn-down; escalate scope creep or schedule risks to Practice Lead within 24 hours

Client & Stakeholder Engagement

• Single point of contact for client technical questions and scope discussions
• Conduct weekly status reviews with client decision-makers; communicate progress in business terms (features shipped, risks mitigated)
• Facilitate discovery workshops with end users; translate requirements into acceptance criteria
• Manage change requests; evaluate impact on schedule/budget; make go/no-go decisions with client sign-off

Team Enablement & Culture

• Pair with each team member weekly; assess skill gaps, provide growth feedback
• Foster no-blame, blameless postmortem culture after incidents; drive continuous learning
• Enforce daily code reviews, pair programming on risky changes, and knowledge-sharing sessions (weekly tech talks)
• Celebrate wins; recognize contributions publicly in client reviews and internal forums

Architecture & Technical Governance

• Own POD architectural decisions in collaboration with Solution Architect and FDE; ensure implementation choices remain grounded in client workflows and scalable platform patterns
• Enforce coding standards, security policies, and compliance requirements (data residency, audit trails in UAE context)
• Approve technical debt trades; maintain living ADR (Architecture Decision Record) document
• Ensure testing coverage, performance SLAs, and incident response protocols

Required Experience

• 8+ years in software delivery, product management, or engineering leadership
• 3+ years managing cross-functional teams (backend, frontend, data, QA) in agile environments
• Experience scaling delivery from 0 1 (discovery, MVP) through 1 N (scale, optimization)
• Client-facing leadership: B2B software sales, managed services, or enterprise consulting
• Technical depth: Comfortable reviewing API contracts, data schemas, deployment logs and cloud platform patterns; able to challenge backend/frontend changes and understand Oracle and Azure integration considerations

Nice-to-Haves

• AI/ML project delivery experience (LLM tuning, agent orchestration, prompt engineering)
• UAE market knowledge (local compliance, hiring, vendor ecosystems)
• Oracle and Azure cloud experience, including data integration, identity/security patterns, cost optimisation and DevOps delivery practices
• NVIDIA GPU infrastructure experience (scaling, distributed training)

Tools & Competencies

• Agile ceremonies: Jira, sprint planning, velocity tracking
• Client communication: Lucidchart, Figma, Slack, structured status reporting
• Metrics: OKR tracking, burn-down, defect rates, code coverage, uptime SLAs
• Technical: Git workflows, REST/gRPC APIs, SQL basics, Oracle data/platform awareness, Azure services, Docker/Kubernetes high-level knowledge