Team Lead, Delivery Management

THE ROLE The Team Lead owns what the Bolt delivery team ships across Element451’s AI-powered product experiences. This is a player-coach role: you lead and grow the team while staying close enough to the code and product to make real technical calls. You manage up to eight engineers and are accountable for the team’s delivery end to end — velocity, predictability, quality, and safe operation of customer-facing AI experiences, from planning until working software is live in production. Bolt brings AI-powered and agentic experiences into the workflows colleges and universities use to recruit, enroll, and support students. Its product shape will continue to evolve as we learn from customers and the market. This role turns that direction into dependable product outcomes while helping the team navigate ambiguity, make sound technical trade-offs, and keep shipping predictably. The role flexes with team size — genuinely hands-on while the team is small, and trending toward leadership as it grows. It reports into the Director, Engineering and owns a single team, not a department. Technical standards and architecture are owned by the Principal Engineers; the Team Lead reinforces them and escalates decisions beyond the team’s scope. See Appendix A for development lifecycle expectations. Where the lines are: Product owns problem prioritization, product strategy, and desired outcomes. The Team Lead partners closely with Bolt Product leadership and owns team capacity, delivery commitments, execution, release readiness, and engineering quality for the Bolt team. Principal and Senior Engineers define and own technical standards and architecture within their domains. When work crosses product, platform, or team boundaries, the Team Lead coordinates with the relevant technical owners and makes dependencies and ownership explicit. The Director, Engineering oversees the team’s delivery, develops the Team Lead, and owns the system across teams. EXPECTATIONS Delivery & Execution - Owns the Bolt team’s delivery end to end — velocity, predictability, quality, and production outcomes — from cycle planning until working software is in production, not merged or sitting in staging. - Owns team-level cycle shaping and planning: sizes and scopes work to a deliverable cycle boundary, grounds commitments in honest engineering analysis, and represents the team’s capacity and constraints to Product before anything is agreed to. - Maintains a clear, real-time understanding of the team’s capacity, workload, delivery risk, and operational health; surfaces concerns early — no surprises. - Partners with Bolt Product leadership to turn product outcomes into coherent, deliverable engineering scope, while keeping cross-team ownership and dependencies explicit. Quality, Standards & Release - Owns the team’s engineering–QA contract — when QA engages in the cycle, what a ready handoff from engineering looks like, and what quality gates must clear before a release. - Reinforces the technical standards and architecture owned by the team’s Senior and Principal Engineers — holds the team accountable to code quality, review thoroughness, testing, sound architecture, and responsible AI engineering, and creates the conditions for those standards to be applied consistently rather than only under pressure. - Owns release health for the team — “done” means in production and operating as intended. Drives completed work to release and removes the organizational and process blockers that delay deployment. - Treats AI quality as an engineering discipline. Ensures changes to agent behavior, prompts, models, knowledge retrieval, tools, and orchestration are evaluated proportionately to risk, with production-informed regression coverage, repeatable evaluations, explicit release gates, progressive rollout, monitoring, rollback, and feedback loops that turn failures into durable test coverage. - Uses measured product and operational signals — including correctness, relevance, safety, lat…