Description
We're looking for a Technical Delivery Manager to strengthen the bridge between our Product and Engineering work. This isn't a traditional Product Manager role, and it's not an engineering role — it's the person who makes sure the work between those two functions is clear, moving, and shipping.
You'll own our delivery process: turning design outputs into actionable tickets, keeping development cycles on track, facilitating estimation, and closing the loop to ensure QA happens and tickets get closed and shipped.
This role is well-suited to someone who has worked closely with engineering teams, has strong instincts for what makes work "ready," and genuinely enjoys the operational side of software development. If you love making task lists and making sure things get done, this is a great role for you.
About iNaturalist
iNaturalist is one of the world’s largest biodiversity platforms—powered by millions of community scientists and supported by expert naturalists, researchers, and conservation organizations. With hundreds of millions of observations and 400,000+ active monthly contributors, iNaturalist data informs conservation decisions, accelerates biodiversity research, and inspires people everywhere to connect with nature.
Founded in 2008 and operating as a nonprofit committed to open data, iNaturalist blends crowdsourcing, machine learning, and community science to help people understand, document, and protect biodiversity. Our vision: a world where everyone can discover, understand, and help sustain life on Earth.
We’re growing—and we’re looking for people energized by purpose-driven work to help scale the platform and experience for millions around the world.
What You'll Do
Planning & Scoping
- Partner with product and engineering staff to produce engineering-oriented build plans for major features, platform work, and releases (e.g., Android beta, significant new features)
- Create tickets when work needs to be logged and broken down but engineers are heads-down. Follow up on stub tickets to make sure they get fleshed out and planned.
- Manage ticket triage to ensure new tickets are getting attention at the right level.
- Manage the backlog to make sure that lingering priorities also get attention.
- Facilitate estimation processes to ensure work is sized with shared understanding.
- Support Head of Product and Engineering in estimating engineering capacity and velocity.
Ticket Quality
- Triage and improve unclear tickets by coordinating between engineers and designers to surface what's actually needed.
Write or sharpen acceptance criteria so that "done" has a consistent, testable meaning. - Maintain backlog to help us stay focused on the most important work
Cycle Health
- Own the process of cycle planning to ensure we’re working on the right things, scoping our cycles effectively, and making progress to our goals.
- Monitor active development cycles and proactively flag when work is blocked, drifting, or stalling silently.
- Surface delivery risks early, before they become missed commitments.
QA & Closure
- Perform functional QA on completed tickets, verifying work against acceptance criteria.
- Close tickets with confidence or reopen them with a precise explanation of what's missing.
- Keep completed work from accumulating in "done but not closed" limbo.
Communicate with Community Technical Contributors
- Respond to open source contributors and triage their questions and pull requests.
- Manage public issues in our Github Repos and ensure clarity of tickets synced between Github and our internal Linear system.
- Engage with our volunteer translators on the Crowdin platform to ensure their contributions are incorporated and that we’re maintaining our connection to them and their work.
Requirements
- Experience working in or alongside software engineering teams in a delivery, program management, or technical PM capacity.
- Strong project management skills, with experience in agile methodologies and a track record of delivering projects on time and within scope, proven through 4-6 years of experience in a related role.
- Enough technical fluency to draft a build plan, understand sequencing and dependencies, and recognize when a ticket is underspecified rather than just brief.
- Strong written communication — you'll be writing acceptance criteria, build plans, and coordination notes that engineers and designers will act on.
- Flexibility on process — you'll be working within an existing team with established norms and a deep backlog.
- Comfort with ambiguity and a bias toward unblocking people rather than waiting for perfect information.
- Familiarity with tools common to small engineering teams (GitHub, Linear, or similar)
Bonus Points
- Experience in open source, nonprofit, or mission-driven software environments
- Background in mobile development cycles or release management (iOS/Android)
- Familiarity with scientific, biodiversity, or citizen science domains
