Process Lead

Job Description

The Role:

System Engineers are responsible for partitioning and allocating product, feature and system functionality to implementation teams. Safety, reliability, and regulatory compliance are factors considered in system design with the goal of optimizing performance, design, testability, and deployability. System engineers identify use cases, define functional technical requirements, enable robust implementation designs, and ensure built-in quality with test definition and traceability.

This role leads the operating model, governance, and end-to-end delivery lifecycle for the Atlassian tool stack. The Senior Systems Engineer will serve as the process lead for Atlassian platforms—Jira, Confluence, and Jira Align—driving standards, scalability, and business value across engineering and product teams. Experience with full‑stack software development is highly desirable to accelerate automation, integrations, and platform extensibility.

Hybrid: This role is categorized as hybrid. This means the successful candidate is expected to report to the Michigan IT Innovation Center three times per week, at minimum.

Company Vehicle: Upon successful completion of a motor vehicle report review, you will be eligible to participate in a company vehicle evaluation program, through which you will be assigned a General Motors vehicle to drive and evaluate.

Note: program participants are required to purchase/lease a qualifying GM vehicle every four years unless one of a limited number of exceptions applies.

What You'll Do:

• Own the end-to-end operating model for Jira, Confluence, and Jira Align, including governance, standards, intake, prioritization, and roadmap for platform capabilities.

• Define, implement, and continuously improve enterprise templates, workflows, schemes, fields, spaces, and permissions aligned to Agile, Scrum/Kanban, and SAFe practices.

• Lead process design for demand intake, portfolio planning, dependency management, and value stream visualization in Jira Align; ensure consistent data models and roll‑up reporting.

• Partner with InfoSec, Compliance, and Enterprise Architecture to enforce access models, SSO/SAML/OAuth, data retention, auditability, and change controls (e.g., SOX/ITGC where applicable).

• Serve as service owner for reliability, performance, capacity, DR/backup, and upgrade strategy across Cloud and/or Data Center footprints; establish SLIs/SLOs and error budgets.

• Drive platform health: app lifecycle and marketplace add‑on governance (e.g., ScriptRunner, Automation for Jira, JMWE), instance hygiene, consolidation/migrations, and deprecation plans.

• Build and maintain integrations using REST/GraphQL APIs and eventing with CI/CD, SCM, incident/CMDB, identity, and analytics platforms; steward data quality and lineage.

• Establish metrics and insights: define canonical dashboards for delivery flow (e.g., cycle time, throughput, WIP), agile health, dependency risk, and portfolio predictability.

• Leverage AI capabilities (e.g., Atlassian Intelligence, Azure OpenAI) to automate routine tasks, enhance search and insights, and prototype AI-assisted workflows with clear governance and guardrails.

• Create and socialize SOPs/runbooks, RACIs, and change/incident/problem management processes; facilitate CAB readiness for platform changes.

• Coach teams and admins on best practices; deliver enablement materials, office hours, and communities of practice to drive adoption and self‑service.

What You'll Need:

• 8+ years in enterprise systems engineering or platform administration with 5+ years focused on Atlassian ecosystems (Jira, Confluence) in large-scale environments.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

• Demonstrated stewardship of Jira Align or equivalent enterprise portfolio tooling at scale (multi-ART SAFe environment or comparable).

• Hands-on administration expertise: schemes, workflows, permissions, custom fields, advanced roadmaps, automation, and space governance.

• Strong grasp of Agile/Lean delivery (Scrum, Kanban) and SAFe constructs (ARTs, PI planning, dependencies, objectives, lean portfolio).

• Proficiency with identity and security: SSO/SAML/OAuth, SCIM, role/permission models, data protection, and audit compliance.

• Experience operating Atlassian Cloud and/or Data Center (install/upgrade strategy, node scaling, Postgres/DB care, backup/restore, DR).

• Scripting/automation skill in one or more: Python, JavaScript