Enterprise Practice Lead (Engineering) (Remote From Anywhere In Colorado)

• Run an engineering guild: technical showcases, architecture review forums, peer code critique, and a culture where engineers across pods feel part of a discipline rather than isolated technical leads.
• Develop a technical career pathway that rewards depth, creating growth options that don’t require moving into people management or project coordination roles.
• Build and deliver training programs that address critical statewide gaps, including vendor oversight and technical evaluation, build/buy/SaaS analysis, EA alignment in constrained delivery environments, and the specific challenge of maintaining code quality when the work is outsourced.
• Create and maintain shared technical resources that practitioners can use without starting from scratch, such as pattern libraries, evaluation frameworks, technical review checklists, and reference architecture guides.
• Advise ITDs on what strong engineering practice looks like in a Delivery Engineer role and how to give meaningful feedback to a technical practitioner whose craft the ITD may not share.
• Distinguish between a practitioner skill gap, a vendor quality problem, and a structural issue such as insufficient code access, inadequate contract terms, or missing technical documentation, and advise accordingly.
• Surface patterns of weak technical practice across pods that point to a training or standards gap rather than individual performance.

What you bring:

• Knowledge of modern software engineering at a deep practitioner level: cloud-native architecture, API design, microservices, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD pipelines, secure coding standards, and what good code and system design actually look like when evaluated without writing the code yourself.
• Knowledge of OIT Enterprise Architecture standards: approved technology patterns, reference architectures, cloud strategy, integration standards, and security baselines, and how all of these translate into practical engineering decisions at the agency level.
• Knowledge of build/buy/SaaS evaluation: how to assess vendor proposals, commercial off-the-shelf options, and custom development tradeoffs in government contexts, including what technical language belongs in SOOs and evaluation criteria, and how to structure evaluations that produce defensible decisions.
• Knowledge of software quality assessment: how to conduct meaningful technical reviews of vendor work through code reviews, sprint demos, and technical documentation. As 18F’s de-risking guide states, the government must have specific employees equipped to inspect delivered code at the end of every sprint.
• Knowledge of security and compliance fundamentals sufficient to set engineering standards that embed security by design, and to identify when a CISO or security team engagement is needed.
• Knowledge of career pathway design for engineers: how to build a technical promotional track that rewards deep engineering expertise and doesn’t force engineers into management to advance. This is a gap that GDS’s framework explicitly addresses through its senior-to-head of engineering progression.
• Ability to lead through technical credibility. Engineering standards get adopted when Delivery Engineers trust that the Enterprise Lead has done the work and understands their constraints, rather than because compliance is required.
• Ability to balance standardization and judgment. Not every agency context is identical. Hold universal craft standards while recognizing that good engineering decisions require judgment about specific constraints, legacy environments, and the delivery phase.
• Ability to keep standards aligned to EA without becoming an EA proxy. Surface systemic technical issues upward; don’t become a gatekeeper or approval layer. The guild’s job is craft, not governance.
• Ability to make the technical promotional track real. Engineers need to see that deep expertise is valued. The Enterprise Lead demonstrates through the career pathway and the guild’s culture that craft is a legitimate and respected path.
• Ability to build a culture of quality under pressure. Vendor delivery timelines, inherited technical debt, and legacy constraints push against good engineering practice. The Enterprise Lead makes quality feel like professional pride, not bureaucratic compliance., Relevant certificate from a major cloud provider such as AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional or Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert.
• Experience drafting technical requirements for Statements of Objectives (SOOs) and leading the technical evaluation of multi-million dollar vendor proposals within a government or highly regulated environment.
• Experience modernizing large-scale legacy systems and adapting modern architecture standards (microservices, APIs) to meet the constraints of established agency-specific technology landscapes.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipeline design and Infrastructure as Code approaches sufficient to evaluate vendor implementations, identify quality and security gaps, and provide meaningful technical feedback - without necessarily building these systems directly.

Conditions of Employment:

OIT employees must comply with any screening procedures in place at state entity locations where they might be required to perform work.

A pre-employment background check will be conducted as part of the selection process.

Positions supporting some agencies such as the Department of Corrections and the Department of Public Safety will also require a pre-employment drug test.

This position may require travel within the specified geographic area, and to locations across the state as needed.

Do you have experience in Software engineering?, A wide salary range is posted for this position and any job offer is based upon a salary analysis to comply with the Colorado Equal Pay for Equal Work Act. The salary analysis considers relevant experience, education, certifications, and state seniority as compared to others doing substantially similar work. While all offers are compliant with the Colorado Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, there is no guarantee an offer will be at the top of the posted range based on the salary analysis.

This is a skills-based job announcement. The required minimum qualifications and/or education (if substituting for the proven experience, knowledge, and skills), are as follows, * A minimum of five (5) years of experience in the delivery of software engineering services, which includes working in or leading cross-functional teams using iterative, user-centered methods

• A track record of working across disciplines - design, engineering, policy, or operations - to ship things that work for real people., Additional appropriate education will substitute for the required experience on a year-for-year basis, but cannot completely substitute for these qualifications.
• Training or Certification related to the work assigned to the position will be assigned credit towards substitution for experience and/or education, but cannot completely substitute for these qualifications.
• If the minimum qualifications include a degree requirement, additional appropriate paid or unpaid experience will substitute for the required education on a year-for-year basis.

3.63.6 out of 5 stars Colorado Remote $115,000 - $145,000 a year - Full-time, Pulled from the full job description

• Opportunities for advancement

Together, we innovate for a stronger Colorado The work of employees at the Governor’s Office of Information Technology (OIT) is challenging and diverse because the needs of agencies, customers and Coloradans constantly evolve. But our focus never changes: improve the lives of all Coloradans through innovation and collaboration. We’re building one of the nation’s leading government IT organizations by reimagining how we support agencies, building first-of-their-kind applications, and creating an inclusive, collaborative culture, together. Join us in the important work of providing equitable access to services. Watch this video to learn more about how we’re Serving People. Serving Colorado., Colorado Governor’s Office of Information Technology is in the middle of a transformation worth joining. We’re building cross-functional pod teams that partner directly with agencies to design, deliver, and continuously improve services that work for Coloradans. Good government depends on technology that works, and OIT exists to make that true for every Coloradan. The State of Colorado is seeking an Enterprise Practice Lead, Engineering, to help build the next generation of public services. We’re looking for people who want to do the best work of their careers in the service of the public. Enterprise Practice Lead, Engineering, owns how software engineering is practiced across OIT’s delivery pods. Where the Delivery Engineer embedded in a pod serves as the technical authority by evaluating build/buy/SaaS options, overseeing vendor technical quality, and acting as EA’s eyes in the agency. The Enterprise Practice Lead owns the craft standards, technical patterns, and professional community that make every Delivery Engineer more capable and consistent.

Guilds at OIT enable consistency, quality, and community across a federated team structure. IT Directors (ITDs) are responsible for the people management of their pod of practitioners; Enterprise Practice Leads guide and support the practitioners to deliver good work.

This is not a developer or enterprise architect role. The Enterprise Practice Lead doesn’t build software or set enterprise technology strategy. They ensure that the technical judgment being exercised across pods is grounded in shared standards and continuously improving. The GDS DDaT framework describes the head of engineering equivalent as someone who “exemplifies what good looks like” and builds community capability rather than acting as a gatekeeper or approver. 18F’s de-risking work reinforces the point: the government needs its own empowered technical staff who can evaluate vendor work, inspect code at sprint end, and flag architecture drift before it becomes a systemic problem. That’s who the guild exists to develop.

What you’ll do:

• Define and maintain engineering craft standards: architecture patterns, code quality expectations, testing practices, security-by-design requirements, and technical documentation norms, each aligned to EA reference architectures and grounded in what’s practical in agency delivery contexts.
• Translate EA standards into usable guidance that Delivery Engineers can apply in specific agency contexts without needing to re-interpret enterprise architecture strategy themselves.
• Identify reusable technical patterns, shared components, and reference implementations across pods that reduce duplication and raise the floor on technical quality statewide.
• Identify patterns of technical risk or architecture drift across the portfolio and surface them to EA before they become systemic problems, the guild’s collective eyes function at scale.