Operation Excellence Lead

Job Summary

We are seeking a senior engineering leader (individual contributor) to drive Engineering & Operational Excellence outcomes across the IS landscape. This is not a project management or coordination role.

You will act as a hands-on transformation operator —partnering with Domain Owners and Engineering Managers to strengthen reliability, delivery predictability, quality, and operational maturity across teams.

You will define and enforce engineering standards, introduce systemic controls, and embed DevSecOps and SRE practices that measurably improve platform health and delivery performance.

Success in this role is measured by outcomes, not activities— including improvements in DORA metrics, incident reduction, automation coverage, and reduced manual operations.

Key Responsibilities

Engineering & Operational Excellence Outcomes

• Establish and drive DORA metrics (deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, MTTR) to agreed targets
• Drive reduction of manual operational work through automation and self-healing capabilities
• Strengthen domain ownership and accountability within the domain-based operating model

DevSecOps Foundations

• Establish and standardize CI/CD release readiness practices across domains
• Embed SRE practices including SLOs, error budgets, and operational guardrails
• Improve observability, monitoring, detection, and alerting maturity

Transformation & Change Leadership

• Orchestrate cross-functional change across Engineering, QE, DevOps, Security, and Operations
• Translate strategic goals into executable improvement roadmaps
• Coach teams and leaders on modern engineering and operational practices
• Introduce new ways of working that strengthen ownership, autonomy, and accountability
• Balance strategy with hands-on execution when needed

Hands-On Engineering Enablement

• Own and drive reliability improvements
• Prototype or pilot tooling/automation where needed to accelerate adoption
• Support implementation of platform and operational tooling (Jira, Confluence, ServiceNow, PagerDuty, CI/CD, observability stacks)

Qualifications

Education & Certifications

·       Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Systems, or related field.

·       Agile, PMP, or DevOps certifications (e.g., CSM, SAFe, PMI-ACP) preferred.

Experience

• 15+ years in software engineering, platform engineering, SRE, DevOps, or engineering excellence roles
• Proven experience driving engineering or operational transformations at scale
• Track record improving reliability, delivery speed, and operational efficiency with measurable results
• Experience working across multiple teams/domains in large or complex environments
• Hands-on experience with cloud-native architectures, CI/CD, and modern engineering practices
• Experience in digital platforms, or large-scale mission-critical systems is advantageous.

Technical & Functional Skills

• Strong understanding of DevSecOps, SRE, and continuous delivery practices
• Familiarity with DORA metrics, incident management, and operational health frameworks
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, containerized services, and microservices architectures
• Knowledge of testing strategies, automation frameworks, and quality engineering practices
• Working knowledge of tools such as Jira, Confluence, ServiceNow, PagerDuty, GitLab/GitHub, Jenkins, observability platforms

Leadership & Behavioral Traits

• Outcome-driven with strong systems thinking
• Comfortable challenging the status quo with data and evidence
• Influential communicator able to work across engineering and business stakeholders
• High ownership, bias for action, and hands-on mindset
• Pragmatic implementer — able to move between strategy and execution

What Success Looks Like 

• Measurable improvements in DORA metrics and system reliability
• Reduction in manual ops and incident-driven work
• Consistent adoption of engineering standards across domains
• Increased automation 
• Stronger domain ownership and operational maturity
• Engineering teams operating with greater autonomy, predictability, and quality