Engineer Lead

An Engineering Lead is a people manager, leader, and mentor with the ability to cross-functionally lead program delivery.

You are an emerging subject matter expert that is developing the skills to successfully lead through team members and effectively communicate and execute against program and organizational objectives.

In this role, an Engineering Lead will support leadership in partnering with peers to meet delivery requirements.

You will guide the design and delivery of engineering platforms, automation, and AI-enabled services that help IRS teams build, secure, authorize, and release software faster.

The role combines platform engineering, DevOps, developer experience, ATO automation, AI systems, data engineering, and team leadership.

A primary goal is to translate complex security, compliance, and operational requirements into reusable platform capabilities rather than requiring each application team to solve them independently.

Primary expectations of an Engineering Lead include:

• Develops an understanding of program scope, schedule and cost management; with the support of leadership, articulates contractual delivery requirements to team members
• Provides coaching and development to engineering team members, and works with leadership to define growth goals and development plans, and creates a culture where people can learn and evolve
• Serves as a mentor, supporting one or two teams' Engineers in technical direction and career management
• Leads team processes and seeks out best practices to fill gaps
• Develops collaboration skills to partner with key stakeholders to represent the engineering practice in advocating for the best technical solutions while communicating tradeoffs
• Development of effective written communication and presentation skills to describe systems, design decisions, and past performance
• May participate in bid-writing, tech demos, strategic planning, and other client-facing communications
• Presents program's ongoing engineering work, future goals, and risks
• Development of influential skills to translate and communicate technical challenges and roadmaps
• Participates in interviews with new candidates and develops/grades homework
• Responsible for hiring, performance management, timecard reviews, PTO management and team development
• Help define the technical direction for internal developer platforms, CI/CD services, engineering automation, and AI-enabled tools.
• Design reusable platform services, APIs, templates, workflows, and integrations that improve software delivery.
• Translate ATO, NIST, RMF, and IRS security requirements into automated controls, policy checks, evidence collection, and approval workflows.
• Develop internal developer platform capabilities using technologies such as Red Hat Developer Hub, Backstage, OpenShift, and GitHub.
• Create self-service workflows for project onboarding, software requests, access, environments, infrastructure, and deployments.
• Build and maintain reusable CI/CD workflows using tools such as GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or similar platforms.
• Design and integrate AI solutions, including retrieval-augmented generation chatbots, multi-agent systems, and AI-assisted engineering workflows.
• Build or support data integrations, data pipelines, metadata services, analytics, and reporting capabilities.
• Improve the developer experience by simplifying tooling, reducing manual work, and promoting reusable delivery patterns.
• Lead technical discovery, architecture reviews, demonstrations, planning sessions, and stakeholder discussions.
• Translate ambiguous requirements into clear technical plans and deliverable engineering work.
• Mentor engineers, provide technical direction, improve team practices, and support hiring and professional development.
• Produce clear documentation, training, and operational guidance that supports platform adoption.