Contract Software Engineer (Principal Consultant)

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.

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.

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 policies: severity classification, triage SLAs, root cause analysis requirements for critical defects, and defect escape tracking that feeds back into test design and coverage targets
• Design a Release Train Framework that integrates CI/CD quality gates with organizational gates (legal, privacy, product, data science) into a tiered flow
• Denote environment governance: ownership matrices, stability expectations, incident response procedures, and test data isolation requirements
• Create documentation standards for test strategies, process playbooks, knowledge bases, and onboarding materials

Engineering Effectiveness & Measurement

• Design a tiered measurement framework informed by industry standards, such as: DORA (Deployment Frequency, Lead Time for Changes, Change Failure Rate, Mean Time to Recovery) to provide a complete view of both delivery performance and engineering team health
• Design a tiered KPI framework aligned to audience and decision-making level  leadership metrics, practice metrics, and team metrics
• Establish metric ownership, data sources, collection methods, and targets for each KPI
• Develop a maturity assessment model across five dimensions (governance, process, standards, observability, culture) with progressive scoring from Initial through Defined to Optimizing, establishing the baseline during Discovery and reassessing quarterly

International Scaling & Practice Evolution

• Design every governance artifact as parameterized from day one: standards, gates, test data specifications, and compliance suites that extend by configuration when new markets are added rather than requiring framework rewrites
• Integrate GILT testing requirements (Globalization, Internationalization, Localization, Translation) into quality gate criteria, test strategy standards, and compliance suites 
• Design market adaptation protocols for scaling governance to new international markets, including parameterized standards (regional formats, compliance, locale-specific criteria)
• Work with the Test Architect to ensure test data management is designed to support regional formats, currencies, tax regimes, and locale-specific data from the foundation layer
• Build the continuous improvement cycle into the governance model: quarterly practice reviews, pattern analysis from QRB decision logs, refinement backlogs, and outcome tracking
• Evaluate which governance functions benefit from automation as the number of markets and teams grows  metric collection, gate enforcement, reporting generation
• Author the scaling roadmap that extends governance from pilot team to multi-team, multi-market operation

Change Management & Practice Sustainability

• Design and execute the change management strategy for governance adoption: stakeholder alignment, communication cadences, resistance management, and adoption measurement through leading indicators
• Produce the manual-to-automation transition plan: a phased bridge from manual testing with recommendations on role evolution, pace, and support structure mapped at 6, 12, and 18-month milestones
• Develop pilot onboarding plans with governance orientation materials, training plans, and first-sprint playbooks
• Facilitate knowledge sharing and cross-team learning to build a culture where quality is integrated into engineering identity rather than treated as a separate concern

• 10+ years of experience in management consulting, engineering effectiveness, organizational design, or quality engineering leadership within technology organizations
• Demonstrated experience designing and implementing governance frameworks, operating models, or Centers of Excellence for engineering or quality functions
• Demonstrated ability to lead structured discovery engagements with consulting-grade rigor: hypothesis-driven interviews, stakeholder mapping, maturity assessments, and executive-ready deliverables
• Experience designing and facilitating executive workshops that synthesize competing stakeholder perspectives into aligned governance models
• Consultative mindset: able to earn credibility quickly with client leadership and engineering teams, navigate organizational politics, and maintain trusted-advisor relationships
• Strong command of decision-rights frameworks (DACI, RACI) and experience applying them to real organizational decision-making
• Working knowledge of Engineering Effectiveness measurement frameworks: DORA metrics, SPACE framework, and DevEx principles with the ability to design tiered KPI systems that connect engineering team health to business outcomes
• Experience in organizations scaling internationally: designing governance, standards, or quality frameworks that accommodate multi-market complexity including GILT (Globalization, Internationalization, Localization, Translation), multi-jurisdiction compliance, and locale-specific requirement variations at scale
• Technical fluency in software delivery lifecycles, CI/CD pipelines, test strategy (test pyramid, fault localization, coverage models), and quality gate design
• Deep understanding of software delivery lifecycles, CI/CD pipelines, and how quality gates integrate into release processes
• Experience with change management in engineering organizations: sequencing organizational transformation, managing adoption, building internal champions, and measuring cultural shift
• Strong written communication: ability to author governance constitutions, process playbooks, maturity models, and executive-level reports

• Background at a management consulting firm (McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Deloitte, Accenture, Slalom, Thoughtworks, or similar) or internal strategy/transformation function
• Experience with platform engineering principles: treating internal developers as customers, designing golden paths, and building self-service governance tooling that reduces cognitive load
• Familiarity with SRE practices, observability stacks, and how operational excellence connects to quality governance
• Familiarity with AI/ML integration into quality workflows and how governance adapts to emerging technology adoption
• Experience with maturity assessment models (CMMI, TMMi, or custom frameworks) and progressive scoring methodologies
• Understanding of privacy, legal, and regulatory compliance frameworks (GDPR, PDPA, PCI) and how they intersect with release processes across multiple jurisdictions
• Contributions to industry publications, conference talks, or community leadership in quality engineering or engineering effectiveness
• Experience building business cases and ROI models for engineering effectiveness investment

Minimum Base Rate: $110 per hour

This is a contract position.

Stable Kernel operates a People Before Place Hybrid model, allowing most employees to choose where they can do their best work most days.

Minimal travel is associated with this role.

*Note – We are not sponsoring employment visas at this time. If you are currently in possession of an employment visa, it will need to be effective for at least 3 years from the date of your application for your candidacy for employment to be considered.

Stable Kernel’s culture is inclusive and expansive. We celebrate diversity in its many glorious forms and do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender role orientation, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

However, we will discriminate against those unwilling to comply with the practice of our company values:

• we work with integrity always
• we respect our work and each other
• we are dedicated to life-long learning and sharing
• we stay hungry for new challenges

If you are like-minded in this regard, we hope you will apply. We look forward to meeting you.