Delivery Manager

About the Company
act digital is a * consultants companies operating in 12 countries: Brazil, US, Canada, Morocco, Portugal, Spain, France, Germany, Belgium and Poland.
In Germany, France, Luxemburg and Belgium, act digital is aiming at increasing its nearshore business with delivery centers in Portugal, Poland or Morocco.
To further process, we want to capitise with our local operations in these countries and build a delivery line that serves customer engagements sold by DE/FR/BE-LUX in country sales team.
About the Role
This role is net-new.
The first hire owns the pool end-to-end and is structurally positioned to scale it.
The person in seat is the one who builds the playbook for what country / regional delivery management looks like at act digital.
Responsibilities
- Take full ownership of the DE/FRBELUX — sourcing, contracting coordination, allocation, performance, timesheet and invoice validation, off-boarding — so that the european organization can scale customer engagements.
- Pool management — full lifecycle: Pool fully under management.
Every person has a clear engagement, a named owner, a current performance read, and a documented exit plan when a contract winds down.
- Vault and Pipedrive data is clean and current.
- Timesheet and invoice validation function handed over without a customer-facing disruption.
- Pool operating at or above its gross-margin target, with per-engagement margin visibility— you know at any moment which engagements carry the pool and which are underwater.
- Contracting and onboarding.
Coordinate with whichever local subsidiary legally signs the contract under each engagement's commercial fit.
The legal contract follows the customer's need;
you own the operationalonboarding.
- Allocation.
Match experts to engagements in dialogue with the shared-resource requests.
- Project management and profitability: Team building.
- Performance management.
Regular 1:1s with each expert in the pool, performance read into engagement reviews, surfacing issues before they escalate to customer-facing impact.
- Timesheet and invoice validation.
Sign off on hours worked vs SOW commitments;
validate supplierinvoices before they hit finance ops.
Transition from Sales during onboarding;
in steady-state covers all experts on engagements.
- Off-boarding and replacement search.
Manage contract wind-downs, exit conversations, and replacement-search coordination.
- Pool data hygiene.
Vault entries, status updates, leaving dates, Pipedrive sync — the pool data is the single source of truth and stays current because you keep it so.
- Engagement-level project management.
Keep nearshore engagements on track — milestones, dependencies, risks, escalation paths — coordinating with the customer-facing engagement lead in the selling country rather than duplicating them.
- Profitability targets.
Own the pool's gross-margin targets.
Track margin per engagement, flag deteriorating ones early, and steer rate and allocation decisions to keep the pool above target.
- Team spirit.
Turn a distributed pool of individual experts into a team — regular pool-wide touchpoints, peer exchange between engagements, a shared identity that outlasts any single contract.
- Build teams whenever possible.
Prefer multi-person delivery teams over lone-expert placements wherever the engagement shape allows — teams retain knowledge, absorb churn, and grow the engagement beyond the individual seat.
Qualifications
- 8+ years of delivery management experience in IT services, consulting, or nearshore/offshore operations — with at least 3 years in a role where you directly owned a pool of 20+ consultants or freelancers across multiple customer engagements.
- Proven experience building or scaling a nearshore delivery function — ideally Portugal-based serving Western European or North American clients.
You have stood up the operating model (sourcing pipeline, contracting flows, allocation rhythm, performance cadence, cross-border invoicing) from scratch or from a low-maturity baseline, not just operated a mature one.
- Multi-entity, multi-jurisdiction operating experience.
You have worked with consultants contracted in one country and delivered into another, and you understand the practical implications — labour law, billing-entity routing, margin shares, tax residency — without needing them to be solved for you.
Required Skills
- Strong commercial instinct.
You can read a P&L, understand gross margin per engagement, and use that lens to make allocation and pricing decisions in real time.
- Direct experience with rate negotiation against external freelancers is essential.
- Track record of operating in matrix structures — you have a comfortable history of reporting into one country while delivering to another, working through functio