Agile Delivery Lead

Job description / Role

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.