Introduction text

Schwarz Digits creates the technological foundation for digital sovereignty in Europe. As the IT and digital division of the Schwarz Group, we develop and manage the IT infrastructures for the retail divisions Lidl and Kaufland, as well as Schwarz Production and PreZero. At the same time, we operate as an independent provider in the external market to support companies across Europe in their digital transformation. We bundle our core services in the areas of Cloud, Cyber Security, Data & AI, Communication, and Workspace.

Join us and contribute to digital sovereignty in Europe. With us, you will work at the intersection of agility and security: You will benefit from fast decision-making processes, enjoy genuine creative freedom in your projects, and be able to build upon the stable foundation of the Schwarz Group.

To future-proof our strong growth and reduce organizational and technical friction, we are looking for an Engineering Productivity Innovator (m/f/d) for our Scaling Team. In this role, you act as a catalyst and hands-on enabler for our organization and its departments. You understand scaling not merely as process optimization, but as the interplay of people, processes, and technology—including advanced automation and emerging technologies like AI-assisted coding and agentic workflows.
You act with a high degree of autonomy and self-reliance, discovering alongside teams what holds them back. You evaluate new technologies and ways of working, make them tangible through rapid Proofs-of-Concept (PoCs), and help build the tools, reference architectures, and automations that take our teams' developer velocity and autonomy to the next level.
You operate in tandem with our Engineer Technical Scaling & Emerging Technologies role: you discover, prioritize, and accompany, while your tandem partner builds, proves, and hands over. Together, you embed these solutions across teams.

Your Tasks

• Organizational & Technology Vision (40%)
  
  • Continuous Diagnostics & Support: Partner directly with product teams ("What are your goals, and why?" / "What keeps you from delivering faster and better?") to highlight friction in processes, governance, and collaboration (e.g., approval pathways, maturity gates, release cycles).
  • Spotlight Global Tech Trends: Drive awareness of global trends (e.g., AI-assisted engineering, autonomous quality gates/CI-CD, Internal Developer Platforms) across the organization using internal formats, team trend scouts, and targeted communication.
  • Future-Proof Engineering Roadmap: Support translating trends into a 2–3 year technology radar by orchestrating the process with the Field CTO, architects, and teams (content definition is supported by Technical Scaling).
  • Architectural Alignment: Co-design and support modern, loosely coupled system and platform architectures to sustainably reduce technical debt. Ensure product teams gain dedicated time to resolve tech debt by translating stabilization needs into business value for decision-makers.
• Hands-on Prototyping & Reference Implementations (35%)
  
  • PoC & Flagship Implementations: Build PoCs and lighthouse implementations directly with teams to demonstrate the practical value of new tools/AI agents as inspiration and discussion bases, ensuring smooth handovers.
  • Golden Paths: Help build clear "Golden Paths" and automations to reduce cognitive load for product teams.
  • Automation-First Governance: Challenge manual governance rules and approvals with teams and prepare their translation into intelligent, automated software systems (execution led by Technical Scaling).
  • High-Impact Change Formats: Design formats that drive real change, such as hackathons targeting the organization's top three friction points (incorporating PoC learnings and proven metrics) and mini-business cases that help teams secure improvement time from leadership.
• Enablement & Coaching (25%)
  
  • Remove Adoption Barriers: Coach product teams and architects eye-to-eye, guiding organizational change with a continuous, supportive, and encouraging approach. Stay engaged long-term to track progress and identify further potential.
  • Transparent Decision-Making: Establish a lean process for transparent decision-making and documentation (e.g., Architecture Decision Records), allowing any affected stakeholder to contribute.
  • Knowledge Transfer: Build efficient product and knowledge transfer networks across the organization (focusing on change enablement over pure theory).

Your Profile

• Must-Have Skills & Requirements
  
  • Practical Experience: Proven track record of measurably improving speed and quality in software and IT organizations—as a project lead, coach, internal consultant, or orchestrator at the intersection of engineering, management, and clients.
  • Hands-on Prototyping Mastery: Strong execution focus with the ability to turn ideas into working PoCs within a few days, including hands-on experience building and operating automations or AI agents.
  • AI & Emerging Tech Integration: Hands-on experience evaluating and rolling out cutting-edge tools (e.g., AI coding assistants, LLM integrations, agentic workflows, IDPs) paired with a sharp sense for distinguishing real value from hype.
  • Distributed Systems & Architecture: Solid grasp of scalable architecture patterns (microservices, event-driven systems, Domain-Driven Design) and modern CI/CD governance—enough to pinpoint where org structures and software architectures bottleneck each other.
  • Developer Experience (DevEx) Mindset: A true passion for making developers' lives easier, eliminating administrative hurdles, and reducing delivery friction—alongside a vision for how teams and AI agents will collaborate (Agentic Experience, Augmented People).
  • Change & Community Facilitation: Experience rallying people around change, navigating resistance constructively, and building Communities of Practice or cross-departmental formats.
• Nice-to-Have Skills
  
  • Experience in engineering organizations with 100+ developers.
  • Experience in organizational development, internal consulting, or IT service management.
  • Experience using engineering metrics (e.g., Lead Time for Change, Change Failure Rate, Deployment Frequency) as tools for enablement rather than control.
  • Experience in regulated environments or with cloud providers featuring formal maturity and governance models.