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 (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.
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 "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.
3. Governance & Technical Standards
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.
4. Cultivating Talent & Community
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.
Success Metrics
Engineering Maturity Index: Measurable increase in adherence to group engineering standards and best practices using DORA metrics.
AI Adoption Velocity: Adoption rate of agentic AI workflows across tribes and the measurable impact on code quality and review cycles.
Quality & Security Velocity: Reduction in technical debt and successful integration of automated, friction-free quality gates.
DevEx Satisfaction: Improvement in developer experience scores as teams focus on high-leverage work rather than manual toil.
What do you have to offer?
Experience: 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.
The "Change Agent" Gene: You have a track record of shifting engineering culture. You know how to sell a vision, build coalitions, and overcome resistance.
AI Pragmatism: You are hands-on with the latest AI coding tools (Copilot, Cursor, etc.) and understand the difference between hype and genuine productivity gains.
Product Mindset: You don't just build tools; you solve problems for your internal customers. You use data to prioritize.
Technical Depth: Deep understanding of cloud-native architectures, DevOps patterns, and security-by-design. Experience influencing senior engineering leadership and driving organisation-wide technical change. You can debate architecture with Principal Engineers.
Passion for continuously evaluating emerging engineering practices and translating them into measurable business value.
Leadership
Leadership Style: Collaborative, empathetic, and "servant-leader" oriented. You lead and coach through influence and value creation, not command-and-control.
You are a recognised engineering leader who influences through technical credibility, collaboration and vision.
You build engineering communities, mentor senior technical leaders and create environments where engineering teams continuously improve.
What do we have to offer?
A dynamic environment: flexible working hours and 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: whether you want to become more of an expert in your field or expand your knowledge horizontally, there’s always room to grow within SD Worx!
As this is an international role open in multiple countries, the full benefits package depends on the specific location. Salary range information will be shared with candidates during the initial interaction with the Talent Acquisition team, either by phone or email.
Why Join SD Worx?
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.
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.
SD Worx Salford, England Office
Salford, United Kingdom
