Sr Engineer - Color Components

Job Purpose

  The Technology Integration Team develops and productizes reusable Color Technology Components that power AkzoNobel’s internal and external customer facing tools. Focus areas include Colorimetric Engines and Building Blocks, Color Visualization, and AI/ML-enabled color services, delivered as modular, configurable, scalable components. Within this team, the Sr.Engineer – Color Components is a senior individual contributor role, accountable for the technical delivery and lifecycle management of an assigned portfolio of technology components (e.g., .NET libraries/NuGet packages, services/APIs and supporting utilities). The role ensures components are application ready for downstream Apps and systems: modular, scalable, well-documented, versioned and operationally ready for consumption. The role provides Senior Technical leadership in the Scrum team(s) and acts as the primary Technical authority for the component portfolio. Working closely with the Product Owner, this Senior Engineer role owns the technical approach, engineering readiness, quality and the sustainable lifecycle of the component portfolio, and raises engineering standards across the team through review, example and mentorship. Within the Scrum team(s), the role functions as a Technical Application Manager (TAM) - directing day-to-day technical work, priorities and quality standards for internal and external engineers contributing to the component portfolio.

Key Accountabilities

 • Technical Application Management & Mentorship: o Provide senior technical guidance and mentorship to Component Engineers. o Coach internal/external software engineers through code reviews, design reviews and knowledge-sharing. o Plan capacity and allocate work across the component portfolio; manage delivery commitments. o Assist with recruitment, onboarding and development of Component Engineers. o Build team maturity in modular design, maintainable code, test automation, CI/CD discipline and documentation quality. o Facilitate Scrum ceremonies and Technical planning for the Scrum team(s) 

• Component portfolio ownership: o Maintain a component catalog (services/packages, dependencies, consumers, environments, ownership). o Define and enforce portfolio standards: versioning, backward-compatibility rules, deprecation/EOL processes and migration guidance. o Drive technical-debt remediation, dependency upgrades and component security hygiene.

• Project Leadership: o Act as Technical lead for mid-sized Projects, providing technical estimates and delivery plans.

• Backlog readiness with Product Owner (PO): o Partner with the Product Owner to translate epics into technically implementable work items with clear acceptance criteria. o Ensure each backlog item has required technical readiness: API/contract details, non functional requirements, test approach, documentation and rollout considerations. o Provide sequencing recommendations based on dependencies, risk and capacity; support sprint planning and execution across internal and external contributors

• Architecture, contracts and Quality engineering: o Steward API/package contracts, integration patterns to ensure consistency and reusability. o Recommend suitable integration architecture for each component (e.g., NuGet package vs service/API) based on downstream consumer needs. o Prescribe designs to meet performance and scalability requirements and ensure validation before release.

o Define and enforce “Definition of Done” and CI/CD quality gates (builds, automated tests, scans, packaging, release notes).

o Collaborate with QA/automation resources to achieve unit, integration, contract and regression coverage.

o Continuously evaluate emerging technologies and propose adoption or roadmap items to improve the component platform.

o Contribute to the Technology Integration Teams technical roadmap by identifying component capability gaps, platform improvements and emerging technology candidates;

o Provide management with inputs for portfolio planning, resource needs and strategic development priorities.

o Contribute a multi-release technical plan for dependency upgrades, deprecation/EOL, security and operability improvements.

• Release management, operational readiness and consumer enablement:

o Coordinate release readiness and ensure components ship with correct artifacts (versioning, docs, migration notes).

o For services, ensure operational readiness: logging/metrics/tracing, health checks, diagnostics and runbooks.

o Support consuming teams with onboarding, integration guidance and migration assistance; participate in incident triage and root cause analysis.

o Acts as the primary technical escalation point for production issues within the portfolio

• R&D interface: o Translate R&D inputs into developer specifications and ensure reference datasets/expected outputs are available for regression testing. 

Experience

Education

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Applied Physics/Mathematics or related discipline.

Experience

• 8-10+ years production-grade software component/ engineering leadership in a .NET/service-oriented environment.

• Experience establishing and enforcing engineering standards and providing Technical mentorship to Engineers.

• Experience working in agile/scrum teams with cross-functional and external contributors. 

• Experience with component lifecycle practices: Versioning, backward compatibility, release management and consumer enablement. Skills

• Strong C#/.NET, API/service design skills, NuGet packaging and dependency management

• Test automation mindset and experience with CI/CD pipelines (unit/ integration/ contract/ regression), quality gates, and security/dependency hygiene.

• Understanding of operational readiness for services (logging/metrics/tracing, health checks, runbooks).

• Strong written/verbal communication; ability to translate domain/scientific requirements into engineering specs and acceptance criteria.

• Working knowledge of Azure fundamentals and SQL integration patterns is desirable; familiarity with color science workflows is a plus (not required).