Tribe Lead Software) Engineering Centre of Excllence

Position: Tribe Lead - ( Software) Engineering Centre of Excllence
Location: Salford

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. We are looking for a Tribe Lead for our Software Engineering Centre of Excellence (CoE) to drive this transformation.

The CoE will establish engineering excellence by improving engineering maturity, adopting AI-native practices, setting modern standards, and fostering continuous learning and innovation. In this role, you won’t manage day-to-day project delivery. Instead, you'll serve as a strategic advisor focused on high-impact initiatives that enhance our software engineering practices across the organisation.

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.

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.

Your Mission - Lead the Software Engineering Centre of Excellence to improve engineering maturity at SD Worx.

AI-Native Engineering Transformation 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.

Orchestrate AI Transformation:

- Set standards for how humans and AI collaborate in designing, reviewing, and delivering software.

Drive Engineering Excellence:

- 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.

Set the Bar:
Create non-negotiable standards for quality and security to ensure that autonomy does not compromise coherence

Increase Software Engineering Maturity:
Continuously enhance capabilities across SD Worx by adopting modern practices, benchmarking against leading companies, and implementing engineering maturity models for ongoing improvement.

Key Impact Areas 1. Driving the AI-Native Transformation Define and execute the strategy for AI-augmented engineering (Git Hub 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.
2. Advancing Engineering Maturity 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…