Agile Delivery Lead

**Agile Delivery Lead (Development Projects)**

**Role Mission**

Own scope, schedule, budget, and quality. Hard-gate releases with ORR/DR, drive CI/CD and quality automation, and deliver predictable value against strict governance and financial targets.

**Key Duties (what you will own)**
- **Delivery Ownership**: Baseline and control scope/schedule/budget; publish **weekly EAC** (date & cost) and recover variance 10%.
- **RAID to Closure**: Run a living RAID (Risks, Assumptions, Issues, Dependencies). Assign owners/dates, escalate early, and land decisions.
- **DoR/DoD Governance**: Enforce **Definition of Ready/Done** as entry/exit gates. Block non-compliant work.
- **CI/CD Orchestration**: Lead pipeline policy (build, unit/API/UI tests, **SAST/DAST/SCA**, perf smoke, infra as code). Require green gates before release.
- **Value-Delivery Sync**: Partner with PO on roadmap and priorities; translate into executable quarterly/sprint plans.
- **Cross-Team Integration**: Map dependencies across squads/vendors; manage capacity, skills, and integration calendars.
- **ORR/DR Leadership**: Run **Operational Readiness Review** and **Disaster Recovery** drills; verify monitoring/runbooks/rollback plans.
- **Executive Reporting**: Produce one version of truth for PMO/Finance/CEO—**DORA, EAC, margin, risk heatmap, ORR status**.
- **Financial Hygiene**: Tie change requests to EAC re-forecast and margin impact; keep CPI/SPI in the 0.95-1.05 band.
- **Continuous Improvement**: Drive retro actions, defect-escape reduction, and automation coverage on critical paths.

**Must-Have Requirements**
- **Experience**: 7-12 years total; **4+ years** hands-on delivery leadership in enterprise or government programs.
- **Track Record**: Proven delivery of multi-squad software projects with measurable outcomes (DORA targets, ORR pass 90%, MTTR reduction).
- **Governance**: Comfortable making **ORR** a hard go-live gate and enforcing DoR/DoD without compromise.
- **Financial Acumen**: E2E ownership of EAC, CPI/SPI, margin; can defend forecasts to Finance/C-suite.
- **Tooling Proficiency**: Azure DevOps or GitLab (boards + pipelines), Jira (if used), Confluence, MS Project/advanced Excel or Power BI.

**Technical Skills (must/strongly preferred)**
- **DevOps & CI/CD**: Trunk-based flow, branching strategies, gated pipelines, artifact/versioning, release automation.
- **Quality Engineering**: Test strategy, risk-based testing, automation (unit/API/UI), coverage analytics, non-functional testing basics (perf, security).
- **Secure SDLC**:SAST/DAST/SCA** policy implementation, vulnerability triage with developers/security.
- **Observability**: Metrics, logs, traces; incident response; **MTTR** playbooks; feature flags and rollback strategies.
- **Architecture Literacy**: Understand domain-driven design (bounded contexts), integration patterns, API standards.
- **Environment/Infra**: IaC fundamentals, environment promotion flows, data refresh/sanitization basics.
- **OutSystems (plus)**: Familiar with OutSystems delivery patterns, sizing, and platform constraints.

**Soft Skills (non-negotiables)**
- **Decisive Ownership**: Makes the call with incomplete info; clears blockers fast.
- **Executive Communication**: Sharp, concise, and numbers-first; can brief a CEO in 3 minutes.
- **Conflict Navigation**: Aligns vendors, security, and product under deadline pressure.
- **Systems Thinking**: Designs for flow, not theater; optimizes across the value stream.
- **Coaching & Standards**: Uplifts teams while **holding the line** on gates and quality.
- **Stakeholder Management**: Converts competing priorities into a single executable plan.

**Technical Background (ideal profile)**
- Prior role as **Agile Delivery Lead / Technical PM / DevOps-savvy PM** leading cross-functional squads.
- Hands-on familiarity with: Azure DevOps/GitLab pipelines, SonarQube, OWASP ZAP or equivalent, Playwright/Cypress/Postman, Docker/K8s basics.
- Comfortable reading architecture diagrams/ADRs and challenging risky designs.

**Business Experience (preferred)**
- Government or regulated sectors (finance, energy, healthcare) with strict compliance and audit trails.
- Vendor orchestration and contract-aware delivery (SLAs, scope management, CRs tied to EAC).
- Reporting to PMO/Finance; quarterly planning; portfolio dashboards; steering committees.

**Education & Certifications (nice-to-have)**
- B.Sc. in CS/IS/Engineering (or equivalent experience).
- **Scrum/Agile**: PSM/PSPO, SAFe or LeSS exposure (pragmatic, not dogmatic).
- **DevOps/SRE**: Any CI/CD, Cloud, or SRE certification a plus.
- **Security/ITIL**: ITIL Foundation, security awareness certs beneficial.
- **OutSystems**: Delivery Specialist track or platform certifications are a differentiator.