Engineering Practice Lead — Job Description
Role summary
The Engineering Practice Lead is accountable evolving, and rolling out engineering practices across software teams to improve delivery outcomes, quality, consistency, and compliance. This role works with Engineering governance board(a virtual board combined with different lead from Engineering) to drive principles, policies, decision frameworks and ways of working (SDLC, agile operating model, quality gates, toolchain usage), ensuring alignment with broader IT governance and enabling teams to deliver safely, predictably, and at scale.
This is a cross-team enablement and change management role: you need to influence teams and leaders, work with the governance board to establish standards, and influence each team to implement the supporting processes and tooling—without being the day-to-day technical owner of any single product.
Key responsibilities
1) Tech governance and standards
- Facilitate the tech governance board to define and maintain engineering principles, policies, and minimum standards (e.g., coding standards, branching strategy, security-by-design, observability, CI/CD expectations).
- Establish and run lightweight governance mechanisms (e.g., architecture/engineering review forums, exception handling process, decision logs, tech debt management).
- Ensure teams follow agreed decision frameworks and align engineering practices with broader IT governance, risk, security, and compliance requirements.
- Ensure maintaining reusable templates and “golden paths” (reference pipelines, starter repos, standard configs, documentation patterns) coming from governance board.
2) Ways of working and SDLC evolution
- Continuously improve the end-to-end SDLC across teams: discovery-to-delivery flow, environments, testing strategy, release management, incident/problem feedback loops.
- Standardize and scale agile practices where helpful (team ceremonies, backlog hygiene, estimation approaches, dependency management), while keeping autonomy and avoiding heavy bureaucracy.
- Work with Platform team to define and embed quality gates (e.g., static analysis, test coverage thresholds, security scans, change management requirements) and ensure they are measurable and pragmatic.
3) Change management, and community building
- Support the team to coach engineering teams, engineering managers, and tech leads on adopting standards and improving delivery practices.
- Facilitate communities of practice (guilds/chapters), working groups, and curate internal playbooks.
- Lead change management: stakeholder alignment, communications, rollout plans, adoption tracking, and iteration based on feedback.
- Identify systemic issues and drive continuous improvement initiatives across teams.
4) Metrics, assurance, and continuous improvement
- Define and track engineering health and delivery metrics (e.g., DORA metrics, defect escape rate, lead time, reliability indicators, security findings, technical debt signals).
- Use data to prioritize improvements, measure adoption, and demonstrate impact.
Key deliverables
- Engineering standards and playbooks (SDLC, branching, testing strategy, release policy, incident and postmortem templates).
- Quality gate framework embedded into CI/CD pipelines.
- Decision-making framework (e.g., ADR practice) and governance cadence.
- Tech debt management framework and governance cadence
- Standard tooling configurations and templates (pipeline templates, IaC modules, dashboards) with platform team and domain architect team.
- Engineering health dashboards and quarterly improvement roadmap.
Stakeholders & interfaces
- Engineering teams, tech leads, engineering managers
- Platform/SRE/DevSecOps, enterprise architecture, security, risk & compliance
- Product management and delivery leadership (for planning, prioritization, operating model alignment)
- IT governance bodies / architecture boards (alignment and reporting)
Skills and experience
Required
- Strong software engineering background (hands-on experience in modern SDLC, CI/CD, testing, code quality, and secure delivery).
- Proven experience scaling engineering practices across multiple teams (not just within one team).
- Understanding of agile delivery and pragmatic governance (balancing autonomy with consistency and control).
- Ability to influence without direct authority; excellent facilitation, communication, and stakeholder management.
- Comfort with metrics and continuous improvement (DORA, reliability, quality, security posture).