Contract Software Engineer (Principal Consultant)

About the Company:

Stable Kernel is a technology services firm and custom software developer building scalable software solutions for cutting-edge, innovative enterprises to move their business forward. We are headquartered in Atlanta, GA.

We’re a privately held, Great Place to Work Certified Company™ with a multi-award-winning culture and an impressive 10-plus-year trajectory of sustainable growth. At Stable Kernel, we support our employees in ways that help them do some of the best work of their lives.

 

About the Role:

As a Principal Consultant, you will architect the organizational scaffolding that enables Quality Engineering to operate at enterprise scale. This role sits at the intersection of technology consulting and organizational design; you are equal parts strategist, facilitator, and change agent, bringing the structured thinking of a management consultancy to the problem of engineering quality at scale.

You will lead the design and implementation of a Quality Engineering Center of Excellence (CoE) for a flagship enterprise client undergoing international expansion. This means conducting current-state assessments, facilitating executive workshops, synthesizing competing stakeholder perspectives into unified frameworks, and delivering a governance constitution for engineering teams to adopt. You will work in lockstep with a Test Architect to ensure governance directs and enables technical implementation.

This role requires someone who can lead a structured discovery engagement with the rigor of a consulting firm: hypothesis-driven interviews, maturity assessments, gap analyses, and executive-ready deliverables, while earning credibility with leadership and engineering teams by demonstrating that governance is a tool that removes friction rather than a compliance exercise that creates it. You will define how quality decisions get made, how standards are enforced without bottlenecking delivery, and how the practice adapts as the organization scales into new markets.

 

Core Responsibilities Include:

Quality Engineering Policy & Governance Design

• Author the Governance Constitution across five pillars: Decision Rights (DACI framework), Quality Codification (standards that define what quality means operationally), Oversight (enforcement mechanisms), Measurement (KPI frameworks), and Evolution (capacity for self-improvement)
• Design the operating model for a Quality Engineering Center of Excellence, defining the centralized standards and decentralized execution
• Position Quality Engineering governance as a microcosm within the client’s broader organizational governance
• Establish the Quality Review Board (QRB) charter, membership, authority boundaries, cadence, and decision-logging mechanisms

Strategic Discovery & Organizational Assessment

• Lead structured discovery engagements using hypothesis-driven interview frameworks, stakeholder mapping, and maturity assessments to produce an integrated current-state picture across governance, process, and technical landscapes
• Map the client’s full release process end-to-end: from code complete through quality gates, business stakeholder sign-off, privacy and legal clearance, and production deployment
• Conduct product and technology workshops to capture business scaling objectives, engineering aspirations, and cross-functional pain points that the governance model must accommodate
• Produce a prioritized gap and risk register, identify quick wins that demonstrate value during the assessment phase, and deliver a Quality North Star Roadmap with 6, 12, and 18-month milestones

Stakeholder Alignment & Cross-Functional Governance

• Build alignment across product teams, engineering leadership, legal, and business operations stakeholders who have different definitions of quality, different release urgency, and different tolerance for process overhead
• Design cross-functional governance interfaces that define what the Quality Review Board provides to and receives from each existing organizational forum: leadership syncs, architecture reviews, compliance reviews, and release management
• Translate business scaling objectives (new markets, product lines, growth targets) into governance requirements the model must accommodate
• Manage stakeholder expectations across engagement phases with executive-ready deliverables structured for board-level consumption

Quality Codification & Standards Development

• Define quality gate standards for each checkpoint in the software delivery lifecycle: PR merge gates, QA deploy gates, and release certification gates with explicit pass/fail criteria, ownership, and exception processes
• Establish defect management pol