Director, Enterprise Agility & Delivery

Role Purpose 

This role exists to turn agentic and modern delivery practices into the default way IRIS builds software, and to keep delivery moving as the constraints shift. The transformation introduces new tooling, a standardised PDLC, and agentic workflows. None of that delivers value until teams change how they actually work, and until the bottlenecks those changes expose are found and cleared. 

The Director, Enterprise Agility & Delivery is a senior delivery leader accountable for two connected things. First, embedding the new ways of working across an 800-person engineering and product organisation so they hold after the training stops. Second, identifying where flow breaks down next, whether in spec quality, review, governance, dependencies or hand-offs, and driving the resolution. The agentic pilot showed the bottleneck moves upstream the moment build accelerates. This role owns the discipline of chasing that constraint wherever it lands. 

This is a delivery role, not a facilitation one. Success is measured in faster cycle time, better flow, stronger delivery predictability, and adoption that sticks. Not in sessions run or frameworks produced. 

Core Accountabilities:

Embed the new ways of working 

• Coach teams, engineering leads and senior stakeholders to operate in the agentic SDLC and the standardised PDLC in practice. Carry the transition from the bootcamp into daily habit, partnering with the Director of Agentic Engineering Transformation through the post-bootcamp period where both roles have a shared interest in adoption holding. Build the coaching capability of division leaders and engineering leads so the organisation depends less on central coaching over time. 

Find and clear the next constraint 

• Treat the SDLC as a system. As one bottleneck clears, surface the next one through delivery data, observation and direct work with teams, then drive it to resolution with the relevant pillar or division. Bring the cross-functional view that no single division or function holds on its own. 

Build reusable practice 

• Capture what works in pilot and lead teams and convert it into reusable assets: delivery playbooks, working patterns, lightweight governance artefacts, and decision-making approaches such as lean ADRs. Run a learning loop that turns local experiments into organisational standards without slowing the teams doing the experimenting. 

Reduce governance friction 

• Work with Governance, Risk, Compliance and Security so agentic delivery is traceable, auditable and safe to scale. Replace heavyweight process with lean, high-signal controls: human-in-the-loop checkpoints, quality gates, decision logs. Make the safe path the easy path. 

Move the delivery metrics 

• Take accountability for improvement in the delivery and agility metrics: cycle time, throughput, deployment frequency, predictability, defect and incident rates, and adoption of agentic practice. Use the Observability pillar's instrumentation as the measurement system rather than building a parallel one, and report progress in terms leadership can act on. 

Lead change across the organisation 

• Act as a change catalyst across engineering, product, governance and leadership. Influence prioritisation, ownership models and leadership behaviour. Name friction honestly, to a team, a process or a programme initiative, and bring it to the right people constructively. 

The coaching team 

• Two Agile Coaches report into this role. They work at team level across the divisions, embedding the standardised PDLC and observability practice, supporting teams through post-bootcamp adoption, and running retrospectives and team health work that produces action. This role sets their priorities against where intervention will have the most impact, and carries the estate-level strategy, framework ownership, and VP and Director stakeholder work that sits above team-level coaching. 

What Success Looks Like in Year 1 

By the end of FY27 we would expect: 

• Measurable delivery improvement across coached and trained teams: cycle time, flow, predictability. Demonstrable, not anecdotal. 

• Agentic and PDLC practices in genuine daily use after the bootcamp, with the transition from training to habit visibly supported. 

• A growing body of adopted playbooks, patterns and lightweight artefacts in common use across engineering and product. 

• At least one major post-build constraint identified and cleared, with the method for finding the next one established and repeatable. 

• Reduced governance friction through lean assurance mechanisms that teams use because they are easier, not because they are mandated. 

• Engineering leaders who are more capable coaches as a result of working alongside this role, not more dependent on it. 

• Executive confidence in transformation progress, supported by reporting grounded in the Observability pillar's data. 

Profile:

Experience 

• Proven senior experience as an enterprise agile coach, transformation lead or delivery excellence lead in a large, complex, distributed organisation. A real delivery track record with accountability for outcomes, not purely facilitation. Deep practical experience coaching engineering and product teams at scale, including where the change met resistance, legacy habits and an uneven starting point across teams. A working grasp of governance, risk, compliance and assurance constraints, and the credibility to operate with architects, engineers, product leadership, governance functions and executives. 

Approach 

• Diagnoses before prescribing and adjusts to the team in front of them. Builds trust with engineers on the ground, not only with programme leadership. Direct and honest, with the standing to challenge constructively. Outcome-focused, measuring success by what teams do differently. Comfortable holding several teams in different states of maturity without losing the thread, and comfortable in the ambiguity of a fast-moving transformation. 

Agentic Delivery 

• Hands-on familiarity with agentic and AI-assisted development tooling beyond surface level, and a credible point of view on how agentic workflows change team dynamics, review culture and the role of the engineer. The shift to agentic working is the largest change this programme introduces, and coaching teams through it takes curiosity about what the tooling makes possible, not process knowledge alone. 

Desirable Experience

• Knowledge of modern engineering operating models: platform teams, value streams, DevOps, SRE, continuous delivery. Familiarity with flow metrics and systems thinking (DORA, value stream mapping, OKRs). Experience in regulated or governance-heavy software environments. Formal coaching or agile accreditation, valued alongside strong practical experience rather than in place of it.