Agile Coach & Engineering Operating Model Advisor

We are looking for a Senior Agile Coach & Engineering Operating Model Advisor for a temporary engagement of 4 to 6 months, hybrid, in Lisbon.

About the Role

You will coach four delivery teams and their leaders in a regulated financial services environment, helping improve delivery predictability, transparency and flow efficiency. You will act as a trusted advisor to Product, Engineering, Architecture and Delivery stakeholders, supporting the transition from Azure DevOps to Jira and helping establish scalable practices and governance without creating unnecessary process overhead.

This is a senior individual contributor role with no direct reports. You guide and challenge teams rather than becoming the permanent owner of their delivery practices — the goal is to build sustainable internal capability that continues after the engagement ends. The ideal candidate is pragmatic rather than dogmatic, outcome-oriented rather than ceremony-oriented, and comfortable working with engineers and technical leaders in complex, regulated environments.

Main Responsibilities

Agile Coaching & Team Enablement

• Assess how teams currently plan, refine, coordinate, execute and improve.
  
• Coach teams on pragmatic use of Scrum, Kanban or hybrid approaches.
  
• Improve backlog readiness, estimation, planning, retrospectives, daily coordination and review practices.
  
• Facilitate difficult conversations around flow, ownership, dependencies and delivery commitments.
  

Delivery Predictability & Flow

• Help teams improve lead time, throughput, flow efficiency, dependency management and planning reliability.
  
• Establish practical standards for Definition of Ready, Definition of Done, refinement and release preparation.
  
• Promote meaningful delivery metrics and discourage metrics that drive counterproductive behaviour.
  
• Improve alignment between Product, Engineering, Architecture and external delivery partners.
  

Jira Transformation Support

• Support Tech Leads and Product Owners as they design boards, workflows, issue hierarchies, dashboards and reporting.
  
• Review proposed configurations and identify risks, gaps and opportunities for simplification.
  
• Support the migration from Azure DevOps to Jira, preserving delivery history and traceability.
  
• Act as advisor and coach — teams build and own the tooling rather than depending on the coach to operate it.
  

Quality, Compliance & Audit Readiness

• Help integrate Xray and test-management practices into the delivery workflow.
  
• Work with Risk, Compliance and Quality Engineering to incorporate approval gates, traceability and segregation of duties.
  
• Ensure workflows support attributable and timestamped changes and can reconstruct the history of sensitive delivery decisions.
  

Leadership & Operating Model Enablement

• Coach Engineering Managers, Tech Leads, Product Owners and Delivery Leads on prioritisation, facilitation and data-informed improvement.
  
• Clarify roles, decision rights, escalation paths and working agreements across the delivery lifecycle.
  
• Create reusable playbooks, checklists, templates and coaching material.
  
• Prepare a sustainable handover plan and train an internal owner to continue after the engagement.
  

Requirements