Catworkx is a company with over 25 years of experience in agile transformation and IT automation, seeking a Lead Jira Engineer to serve as the technical anchor for enterprise-scale Jira environments. This role involves leading optimization initiatives, establishing governance frameworks, and ensuring seamless integration for portfolio management capabilities.
Responsibilities:
- Lead comprehensive Jira optimization initiatives across enterprise environments with 6,000+ users
- Develop and execute normalization strategies to standardize Jira usage patterns, configurations, and best practices across diverse teams and departments
- Assess current-state Jira configurations and identify inconsistencies, redundancies, and areas of technical debt
- Design future-state architecture that balances standardization with legitimate business unit requirements
- Create and maintain a multi-phase optimization roadmap with clear milestones and success metrics
- Oversee the alignment of workflows, permission schemes, notification schemes, issue type schemes, and field configurations to support BigPicture consistency and data integrity
- Establish and enforce configuration governance standards that prevent configuration sprawl and ensure long-term maintainability
- Rationalize redundant schemes and consolidate where appropriate while preserving critical business logic
- Design and implement scheme hierarchies that support both enterprise-wide standards and legitimate department-specific needs
- Create configuration documentation and decision frameworks for ongoing governance
- Ensure Jira configuration decisions actively support and enhance BigPicture portfolio management capabilities
- Validate that issue hierarchies, custom fields, and workflow states align with BigPicture box structures and reporting requirements
- Identify and remediate configuration patterns that create adoption risks or data quality issues in BigPicture
- Collaborate with BigPicture Engineers to ensure seamless integration between Jira and portfolio management layers
- Proactively address technical dependencies and configuration prerequisites for successful BigPicture rollouts
- Provide expert-level hands-on configuration of complex Jira schemes, custom fields, and automation rules
- Execute technical implementations of standardized configuration patterns across projects and business units
- Build and test configuration changes in sandbox environments before production deployment
- Troubleshoot configuration issues and performance bottlenecks that impact user experience or BigPicture functionality
- Implement configuration migrations and consolidation activities during optimization phases
Requirements:
- 5+ years of hands-on Jira administration and configuration experience in enterprise environments
- Expert-level knowledge of Jira schemes: workflows, permission schemes, notification schemes, field configurations, issue type schemes, and screen schemes
- Deep understanding of Jira project architecture, issue hierarchies, and data models
- Proven experience optimizing and normalizing Jira configurations across large user bases (3,000+ users)
- Strong proficiency with JQL, Jira automation, and Jira APIs
- Strategic thinking with hands-on execution capabilities
- Exceptional problem-solving and analytical skills
- Detail-oriented approach to configuration management
- Change management and organizational influence abilities
- Customer success mindset with focus on adoption and user experience
- Atlassian certifications (ACP-400, ACP-620, or equivalent advanced certifications)
- Experience with Jira Cloud implementations
- Knowledge of scripting languages (Groovy, Python) for advanced automation
- ScriptRunner or other Jira app configuration experience
- Background in ITIL, ITSM, or service management frameworks