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About the Role

As Tribe Lead of the CoE, you will define world-class software engineering at SD Worx. You’ll advise engineering leadership on trends, modern practices, and AI-native development to accelerate our evolution into a modern technology company. Your responsibilities include improving engineering capabilities, driving AI adoption, and embedding excellence across every engineering team. Rather than overseeing daily delivery, you will set standards, influence culture, coach leaders, and ensure our practices keep pace with technological change.

Responsibilities

Define the collaboration between engineers and AI throughout the Software Development Lifecycle.
Evolve engineers from software developers to AI-powered engineering orchestrators.
Promote the adoption of AI-assisted and agentic software engineering in design, coding, testing, documentation, operations, and continuous improvement.
Set standards for how humans and AI collaborate in designing, reviewing, and delivering software.
Advise teams on modern engineering practices and establish common engineering standards, quality practices, and governance to enable faster, more secure, and consistent software delivery while preserving team autonomy.
Create non-negotiable standards for quality and security to ensure that autonomy does not compromise coherence.
Continuously enhance capabilities across SD Worx by adopting modern practices, benchmarking against leading companies, and implementing engineering maturity models for ongoing improvement.
Define and execute the strategy for AI-augmented engineering (GitHub Copilot, agentic workflows, automated remediation).
Move the organization from "experimenting with AI" to standardizing it as a core competency, measuring the impact on velocity and code quality.
Modernize our approach to legacy systems, using AI to accelerate refactoring and reduce technical debt.
Drive the shift from "developer-as-coder" to "developer-as-orchestrator," ensuring our teams effectively leverage agentic AI to manage complex workflows.
Define the metrics for "AI-augmented productivity," focusing on how AI accelerates the software development lifecycle (SDLC) and improves output quality.
Act as the primary advisor to leadership on emerging industry standards in software engineering, ensuring SD Worx remains competitive with top-tier technology companies.
Design and deploy "Engineering Crews"—swat teams of experts who embed with tribes to solve critical bottlenecks and upskill teams on advanced technical patterns.
Cultivate a culture of continuous improvement, utilizing data-driven insights to elevate our engineering rigor and craftsmanship.
Manage the maturity model for our internal engineering practices, providing a clear roadmap for tribes to transition high-performing, AI-augmented states.
Improve Developer Experience (DevEx) by reducing engineering friction and increasing engineering effectiveness.
Advise leadership on emerging engineering trends, technology strategy and engineering organisational design.
Lead the SD Worx Campus team and Practice Guilds (Frontend, Backend, QA) to drive peer-to-peer learning and standardization.
Design career paths that reward both deep specialization (T-shaped skills) and high-leverage generalists.

Requirements

10+ years in software engineering, with 5+ years leading engineering transformation, or developer experience at scale (500+ engineers), Engineering Excellence or Centre of Excellence initiatives within large-scale technology organisations.
Track record of shifting engineering culture.
Ability to sell a vision, build coalitions, and overcome resistance.
Hands-on experience with the latest AI coding tools (Copilot, Cursor, etc.) and understanding of genuine productivity gains.
Ability to solve problems for internal customers and use data to prioritize.
Deep understanding of cloud-native architectures, DevOps patterns, and security-by-design.
Experience influencing senior engineering leadership and driving organisation-wide technical change.
Ability to debate architecture with Principal Engineers.
Passion for continuously evaluating emerging engineering practices and translating them into measurable business value.
Collaborative, empathetic, and "servant-leader" oriented leadership style.
Ability to lead and coach through influence and value creation.
Recognised engineering leader who influences through technical credibility, collaboration and vision.
Ability to build engineering communities, mentor senior technical leaders and create environments where engineering teams continuously improve.

Skills

AI-native practices
Modern standards
Continuous learning
Innovation
AI-augmented engineering
Agentic AI workflows
Automated remediation
Refactoring
Technical debt reduction
AI-augmented productivity metrics
Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC)
Emerging industry standards
Engineering maturity models
Cloud-native architectures
DevOps patterns
Security-by-design
Developer Experience (DevEx)
Engineering organisational design
Peer-to-peer learning
T-shaped skills

Location

Europe

Work Type

Flexible working hours
Working from home
Workation (4 weeks per year, EU only)

Experience Level

10+ years in software engineering
5+ years leading engineering transformation
Developer experience at scale (500+ engineers)

Salary/Compensations

Salary range information will be shared with candidates during the initial interaction with the Talent Acquisition team, either by phone or email.

Benefits

Flexible working hours
Working from home
Workation: possibility to work from any SD Worx location (4 weeks per year, EU only)
Free language courses (during your working hours)
Referral program
Learning opportunities: through an individual development plan and professional training
Career growth opportunities

About the Company

SD Worx is a leading payroll and HR technology company in Europe, serving millions of employees in over 27 countries.
We are transforming from a traditional SaaS software organization into an AI-native technology company.
This transition involves more than just adopting new tools, we aim to move away from manual coding and embrace orchestration, code review, and AI-enhanced craftsmanship.
The CoE will establish engineering excellence by improving engineering maturity, adopting AI-native practices, setting modern standards, and fostering continuous learning and innovation.
Your goal is to define our "Operating System" for engineering, transitioning us from a service provider to a technology powerhouse through advanced AI and industry-leading standards.
The future of software engineering involves orchestrating AI agents to generate, analyse, test, secure, and optimise software, allowing engineers to focus on architecture, validation, governance, and complex problem-solving.
This is a strategic leadership role aimed at increasing the effectiveness and maturity of our software engineering efforts.
Shape the Future: You will be the architect of our HR tech & services future, with the budget and C-level sponsorship to make real change.
Scale: Your decisions will impact 1,400+ people and products used across 27 countries.
This is a unique opportunity to shape the future of software engineering across one of Europe's largest HR technology organisations.
You will define how hundreds of engineers build software, accelerate SD Worx's transformation into an AI-native technology company, and establish the engineering standards, practices and capabilities that will enable the organisation to compete with the world's leading technology companies.
Innovation: We are committed to being a leader in AI adoption—you will have the resources to push the boundaries of what's possible.

Equal Opportunity

SD Worx values diversity and inclusion in the workplace. We welcome applications from all qualified candidates regardless of origin, nationality, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, ethnic or social background, or stage of life.
All hiring decisions are made based on skills, experience and role‑related qualifications.