Technical Delivery & Operations Lead - Sportsbook Engineering

What are we building?

Hard Rock Digital is a team focused on becoming the best online sportsbook, casino, and social gaming company in the world. We care about each customer's interaction, experience, behaviour, and insight and strive to ensure we’re always acting authentically.

Rooted in the kindred spirits of the Seminole Tribe of Florida, the new Hard Rock Digital taps a brand known all over the world as the leader in gaming, entertainment, and hospitality. We’re taking that foundation of success and bringing it to the digital space.

What’s the position?

The Technical Delivery & Operations Lead – Sportsbook Engineering exists to improve coordination, visibility, and execution effectiveness across Sportsbook Engineering.

This role works closely with Sportsbook Engineering Managers, Principal Engineers, Product, and peer Technology teams to ensure that delivery plans, technical priorities, and operational realities are clearly structured, well-coordinated, and accurately communicated.

The role does not own teams, people, delivery commitments, or technical decisions. Instead, it enables effective execution by structuring information, maintaining a coherent technical roadmap, surfacing cross-team risks and dependencies, and strengthening alignment across initiatives, while supporting existing engineering leadership.

AI-first organization

Hard Rock Digital is committed to becoming an AI-first organization. Our AI Center of Excellence (AI CoE) exists to empower AI-led innovation by orchestrating partnerships, democratizing knowledge and tools, and building capabilities that deliver value through safe and responsible use of AI. This role is an active part of that: using AI to sharpen planning, reporting, and analysis, and helping Sportsbook Engineering adopt AI tooling consistently and responsibly.

• AI-augmented ways of working. We support approved AI tools (e.g. GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude, ChatGPT) across the engineering lifecycle. You will help embed them into planning, reporting, and delivery practices, and reinforce that teams own what they check in.

• AI across the delivery stack. Tech is actively deploying AI in requirements gathering and planning, PR and code review (e.g. Derpbot), alert investigation (e.g. Alerti), test acceleration, and agentic workflows and MCPs. You will track adoption and surface its impact in delivery and productivity metrics.

• Responsible and governed. We have an AI Charter, Policy, and governance so we innovate with appropriate guardrails. You will help ensure AI use across Sportsbook Engineering stays within those standards, which matters in a regulated betting domain.

• Learning and sharing. We run an AI focus group and recommended learning paths. You will keep Sportsbook Engineering connected to these initiatives and treat AI as a force multiplier for the teams you support.

Key Responsibilities

Stakeholder & Cross-Technology Alignment

• Act as a primary coordination point for Sportsbook Engineering delivery and technical topics with Product and other Technology units.

• Work with Engineering Managers and leaders outside of Sportsbook Engineering to coordinate shared initiatives and organisational dependencies.

• Translate engineering realities into clear, structured, and data-backed communication for technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Ensure ongoing alignment between technical priorities, delivery execution, and business goals.

Technical Delivery, Roadmap & Coordination

• Coordinate and structure delivery plans across Sportsbook Engineering teams into a coherent, cross-team view, covering both product-driven and technical initiatives.

• Drive the ongoing maintenance of the Sportsbook Engineering technical roadmap, including architecture evolution, platform improvements, resilience, and technical debt.

• Facilitate regular planning and alignment sessions with Engineering Managers, Principal Engineers, Product, and other stakeholders to review priorities, sequencing, and dependencies.

• Facilitate regular reviews of insights from observability and monitoring tools (e.g. reliability, performance, operational health), and ensure that resulting actions, improvements, and technical initiatives are reflected in Sportsbook Engineering delivery plans and technical roadmaps.

• Ensure that the technical roadmap and delivery plans are consistently reflected in Jira, based on inputs and validation from Engineering Managers.

• Track progress across teams, identifying delivery risks, slippage, trade-offs, and dependencies early and working with Engineering Managers to address them.

• Support realistic planning by ensuring timelines, scope, and priorities are clearly understood and agreed.

• Support product and engineering prioritisation decisions by analysing delivery, technical, and business data, and translating inputs from Product and the wider business into clear, data-backed recommendations on sequencing and trade-offs.

Engineering Operations, Productivity & Ways of Working

• Work with Sportsbook Engineering Managers to ensure consistent and effective use of productivity and delivery tools (e.g. Jira), including workflows, statuses, estimation approaches, and reporting.

• Establish, track, and evolve delivery and productivity metrics (e.g. throughput, predictability, flow, progress against plan) to provide meaningful insight.

• Analyse productivity and delivery data to identify trends, bottlenecks, and improvement opportunities.

• Prepare consolidated engineering status reports, delivery health views, and roadmap updates for leadership and stakeholders.

• Drive continuous improvement in engineering operations, planning practices, and ways of working across Sportsbook Engineering.

• Drive adoption of AI tooling across Sportsbook Engineering delivery and operations, from planning and reporting through to code review and alert triage, and measure its impact on throughput, predictability, and operational health.

Success Criteria

• Delivery plans and progress are transparent, reliable, and easy to understand for leadership and stakeholders.

• Technical initiatives, architecture work, and technical debt are visible, prioritised, and accurately represented in Jira.

• The Sportsbook Engineering technical roadmap is current, coherent, and actively maintained, with priorities clearly agreed and reviewed regularly.

• Cross-team risks and dependencies are identified early and managed proactively.

• Engineering Managers and Principal Engineers experience reduced coordination overhead and improved alignment.

• Fewer late-stage delivery surprises, with clearer expectations around scope, timelines, and trade-offs.

• Productivity and delivery metrics provide meaningful insight, supporting better planning and decision-making.

• Strong coordination between Sportsbook Engineering and other Technology teams on shared initiatives.

• AI tooling is actively and responsibly adopted across Sportsbook Engineering, with measurable impact on delivery speed, quality, and operational insight.

Requirements

What are we looking for?

• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical topics clearly and concisely to technical and non-technical audiences.

• Strong experience in technical delivery coordination, technical project/program management, or engineering operations.

• Proven experience working with internal technical and product stakeholders across multiple teams.

• Strong organisational, planning, and prioritisation skills, with attention to detail.

• Ability to work effectively through influence rather than authority.

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to synthesise complex data and business information into actionable insights, supporting product and engineering prioritisation.

• Experience working in Agile delivery environments and with modern engineering teams.

• Ability to learn and understand new tec