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.