Scrum Master (Application Development)

Accountabilities:

• Scrum Ceremony Facilitation: Lead Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Reviews, and Retrospectives, ensuring each meeting is focused, time-boxed, and outcome-oriented. Evaluate ceremony effectiveness and redesign or discontinue activities that do not provide value.

• Agile Coaching and Maturity: Coach development teams, Product Owners, and stakeholders on Scrum practices and Agile principles. Establish baseline Agile maturity assessments, define improvement targets, and track progress throughout the engagement.

• Impediment Resolution: Proactively identify and resolve blockers, surface conflicts early, and track impediments through closure. Escalate unresolved issues within 24 hours, providing options and a recommended course of action.

• Team Health and Delivery Metrics: Monitor team velocity, capacity, engagement, and delivery performance. Use flow metrics—including cycle time, throughput, work in progress, and aging work items—to identify trends and drive continuous improvement.

• SAFe Coordination: Participate in PI Planning, iteration planning, System Demos, and Inspect and Adapt events. Coordinate dependencies across teams within the Agile Release Train and ensure backlogs are refined, sized, and mapped to dependencies before planning sessions.

• Product Owner Partnership: Support backlog refinement and prioritization, ensuring user stories have clear acceptance criteria and meet the Definition of Ready. Help prioritize work based on business value and maintain at least two sprints of ready backlog items.

• Client Engagement: Build trusted relationships with client stakeholders through regular meetings, demonstrations, workshops, and progress updates. Communicate delivery risks, trade-offs, and recommendations clearly, including to senior leaders and client sponsors.

• Metrics and Reporting: Track sprint progress, burn-down and burn-up charts, backlog health, and delivery performance. Provide concise sprint summaries that communicate overall status, progress against plan, and decisions required from stakeholders.

• Risk and Scope Management: Maintain risk, assumption, issue, and dependency (RAID) logs. Track potential scope changes, quantify their schedule and budget impacts, and collaborate with the Project Manager and PMO on mitigation strategies.

• Documentation and Practice Improvement: Maintain accurate Jira and Confluence boards and documentation so stakeholders can independently access project status. Contribute reusable Agile resources and publish at least one reusable asset or practice improvement each quarter.

• Outcome and Value Delivery: Define success measures with the Product Owner and client sponsor at the beginning of the engagement. Track business value alongside delivery output and challenge activities that do not contribute to meaningful outcomes.

• Delivery Forecasting: Develop probabilistic forecasts using historical throughput and cycle-time data, communicate confidence levels, and update forecasts every sprint. Identify deviations early and recommend recovery plans.

• Engineering Enablement: Collaborate with architects and engineers to improve Google Cloud delivery practices, including CI/CD, automated testing, and release cadence. Monitor indicators such as deployment frequency and lead time for changes.

• Mentorship and Leadership: Mentor junior Scrum Masters and Agile practitioners, share lessons learned across engagements, and contribute to the development of consistent Agile delivery standards.

• Performance and Development: Work with the PMO to establish quarterly success measures, including sprint predictability, forecast accuracy, proactive risk escalation, client satisfaction, team health, and mentorship contributions. Participate in a tailored development plan aligned with either an individual contributor or management career path.

• Engagement and Onboarding: Manage priorities and utilization in a billable, project-based consulting environment, potentially supporting multiple engagements. Complete onboarding and compliance activities, deliver a baseline assessment of team health, delivery flow, and risks by day 30, and establish an improvement plan with measurable targets by day 90.

Requirements:

• Education: Bachelor's degree in a related field. An advanced degree is considered an advantage.

• Technical Experience: At least 5 years of experience in a technical, engineering, or software development environment.

• Scrum Master Experience: At least 3 years of experience as a Scrum Master or Agile delivery lead, facilitating Scrum ceremonies for one or more application development teams.

• Consulting Experience: At least 3 years of experience in IT consulting or professional services in a client-facing role.

• Agile Certification: Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), Professional Scrum Master (PSM), or SAFe Scrum Master certification.

• SAFe Experience: Hands-on participation in at least two SAFe projects or Agile Release Trains, including PI Planning.

• Cross-Functional Delivery: Experience helping UX, design, and engineering teams translate requirements into deliverable software increments.

• Agile Tools: Strong working knowledge of Jira and Confluence for backlog management, documentation, and delivery tracking.

• Metrics and Reporting: Experience tracking team velocity, capacity, burn-down metrics, and delivery status, and presenting findings to stakeholders.

• Communication and Stakeholder Management: Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to present confidently to senior stakeholders and influence client decisions.

• Analytical and Organizational Skills: Strong problem-solving, planning, conflict-resolution, and organizational capabilities, with the ability to structure ambiguous problems and recommend evidence-based solutions.

• Adaptability and Ownership: A proactive, accountable mindset, comfort with change, and the ability to take ownership of delivery outcomes, recover struggling projects, and escalate risks early.

• Cloud and Application Development: Genuine interest in cloud computing and modern application development practices.

• Preferred Agile Credentials: Advanced certifications such as A-CSM, PSM II, PMI-ACP, or equivalent.

• Preferred Cloud Experience: Experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or other public cloud application development projects.

• Preferred Consulting Background: Experience at a cloud partner, systems integrator, or advisory firm.

• Preferred Business Development Exposure: Familiarity with pre-sales, solution scoping, or Agile transformation initiatives.

• Preferred DevOps Knowledge: Familiarity with DevOps practices and CI/CD pipelines.

• Additional Preferred Experience: Government-sector experience, distributed or offshore team collaboration, probabilistic forecasting, Agile maturity assessments, and coaching Product Owners or client executives.

• Client-Facing Approach: Ability to anticipate risks and decisions, communicate recommendations confidently, and maintain client trust in a fast-paced consulting environment.

• Location and Work Authorization: Must be located in the United States and authorized to work in the United States for the full duration of the engagement.

Benefits:

• Work Arrangement: Fully remote engagement for candidates located in the United States.

• Professional Development: Opportunity to build expertise in Agile delivery, Google Cloud application development, and enterprise-scale project execution.

• Career Progression: Customized development planning with potential progression along an individual contributor or management track.

• Mentorship Opportunities: Opportunities to mentor junior Agile practitioners and contribute to shared delivery practices across engagements.

• Engagement Start: Expected to begin as soon as possible.

• Compensation and Other Benefits: Salary, contract duration, healthcare coverage, paid time off, and other formal benefits were not specified in the provided job description.