Productivity Enablement Specialist

Position Overview

Role Mission: Accelerate AI-enabled process transformation to improve how technology teams deliver value for clients.

The Productivity Enablement Specialist partners directly with engineering, product, platform, and architecture teams to improve delivery effectiveness through workflow optimization, AI adoption, and measurable productivity improvements. This role applies technical expertise, process improvement methodologies, and emerging AI capabilities to reduce friction, improve flow, enhance quality, and accelerate outcomes across a portfolio of technology teams.

What this Role is not

A traditional Agile coaching or facilitation role. While the position influences team behaviors and ways of working, its primary focus is delivering measurable improvements in workflows, systems, tooling, and business outcomes.

An advisory-only role. This is a hands-on execution position accountable for implementing solutions and driving measurable results, not simply providing recommendations.

Core Responsibilities

• Own team-level productivity improvement across a portfolio of 6-7 teams, partnering with engineering, product, platform, and architecture stakeholders to identify friction, redesign workflows, and embed AI-assisted ways of working with clear measures of impact and accountability.
• Apply hands-on technical skills and AI tooling to experiment with, design, and implement AI-powered workflows, automations, and orchestration that improve how teams move from discovery through delivery.
• Lead value-stream and FLOW deep dives to identify recurring sources of friction, including handoffs, rework, blocked time, meetings, and delivery bottlenecks, and translate insights into actionable system, process, and tooling improvements.
• Embed AI into the flow of work, including areas such as drafting, summarization, backlog shaping, test generation, engineering workflows, and other high-value opportunities that reduce manual effort and improve execution.
• Partner hands-on with teams to deliver measurable change, using throughput, predictability, quality, flow, and productivity measures to understand impact, strengthen adoption, and continuously refine solutions.
• Turn successful experiments into repeatable practices, documenting proven workflows, patterns, playbooks, and technical approaches that other teams can adopt and scale.
• Build team capability and ownership, ensuring AI-enabled improvements become sustainable ways of working rather than one-time interventions or centrally owned solutions.
• Serve as the local execution arm of the cross-region productivity operating model, triaging opportunities across supported teams, focusing effort where it can create the greatest impact, and surfacing early indicators of OKR and delivery risk through AI-powered insights.
• Stay current on emerging AI capabilities and engineering practices, applying techniques such as context engineering, MCP, agentic workflows, and automation where they can materially improve delivery outcomes.

Qualifications

• Minimum of eight years of experience in software engineering, technology transformation, developer productivity, technical program management, consulting, or a related technology discipline.
• Undergraduate degree in a related field or an equivalent combination of training and experience.
• Strong understanding of software development lifecycles, modern engineering practices, and delivery methodologies, with the ability to identify and remove delivery bottlenecks.
• Hands-on experience applying AI-enabled tools, automation, or emerging technologies to improve team productivity, quality, and operational efficiency.
• Proven ability to influence and partner with engineering, product, and technology leaders in a complex, matrixed environment while driving measurable change.

Special Factors

Sponsorship

Vanguard is not offering visa sponsorship for this position.

How We Work

Vanguard has implemented a hybrid working model for the majority of our crew members, designed to capture the benefits of enhanced flexibility while enabling in-person learning, collaboration, and connection. We believe our mission-driven and highly collaborative culture is a critical enabler to support long-term client outcomes and enrich the employee experience.