Scrum Master

About the Role

We are hiring a Scrum Master to lead the Metallica team, a highly technical, fast-moving delivery team responsible for capabilities across the Group Data Hub Event Hub and Master Data Management ecosystem.

The team builds and evolves event-driven services using Kafka and delivers master data capabilities including match and merge, fuzzy matching, golden record creation, identity and keying management, and search, create and merge APIs.

The Scrum Master must be able to operate comfortably in the technical details while maintaining delivery focus, team flow, quality and accountability.

This is not a ceremony-only role. The Scrum Master is expected to be hands-on in clearing the path to delivery, connecting the right engineering, architecture, infrastructure, security and business partners, and driving complex work from refinement through production stabilization. The successful candidate will know when to facilitate, when to challenge, when to escalate and when to get directly involved in resolving delivery barriers.

What Success Looks Like

The team has clear priorities, well-refined work and a credible plan that reflects technical dependencies, capacity and risk.

Infrastructure, environment, access, security, CI/CD and release-readiness needs are identified early and actively driven to resolution.

Complex cross-team dependencies are visible, owned and managed without waiting for issues to become critical.

Engineering discussions translate into clear decisions, backlog items, acceptance criteria, owners and target outcomes.

The team moves quickly without sacrificing controls, testing discipline, operational readiness or documentation.

Leaders and stakeholders receive concise, transparent updates that distinguish facts, assumptions, decisions, risks and asks.

Key Responsibilities

Agile Leadership and Team Enablement

Lead Sprint Planning, Daily Scrums, Reviews and Retrospectives with a strong focus on flow, accountability, decision-making and continuous improvement.

Reinforce Scrum and SAFe practices, team working agreements, and clear Definition of Ready and Definition of Done standards.

Partner with the Product Owner, Product Manager, architects and technical leads to turn strategic objectives and technical designs into sequenced, executable backlog items.

Improve story quality, acceptance criteria, estimation, work-in-progress management, handoffs and engineering hygiene.

Use team metrics to identify delivery patterns and drive practical improvements, not reporting for reporting's sake.

Create an environment where technically strong team members can move quickly while surfacing concerns, tradeoffs and dependencies early.

Technical Environment

The Metallica team operates in a highly technical environment. Candidates must be comfortable participating in discussions involving:

Kafka architecture

Event-driven integration patterns

API design

Cloud infrastructure

DevOps pipelines

Environment management

Security controls

Observability

Production support

While the Scrum Master is not expected to perform engineering work directly, they must be capable of understanding technical tradeoffs, identifying delivery risks and effectively coordinating resolution across:

Engineering

Architecture

Platform

Operations teams

The team will be working primarily on Broker Modernization-related work in 2027.

Required / Core Qualifications

Strong working knowledge of Agile and SAFe delivery, including:

PI Planning

Dependency management

Risk management

Program cadence

Technical fluency with:

Kafka or comparable messaging platforms

API-based integration

Cloud infrastructure

CI/CD pipelines

Observability

Production support

Ability to understand architecture diagrams, sequence delivery across technical layers and translate technical discussions into clear work and decisions.

Experience driving work across:

Discovery

Design

Build

Test

Release

Hypercare

Transition to support

Strong facilitation, written communication and stakeholder management skills.

Executive-level status communication.

Demonstrated ability to manage multiple concurrent priorities while maintaining clarity, urgency and follow-through.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience with AWS data and integration services, Kafka schema management, data pipelines, APIs and automation tooling.

Experience with Master Data Management (MDM), including:

Identity resolution

Match and merge

Fuzzy matching

Survivorship

Golden records

Keying concepts

Familiarity with:

Data governance

Data quality

Metadata

Auditability

Regulated-data controls

Experience in a large, matrixed organization with shared platforms and multiple delivery teams.

Insurance industry experience, particularly:

Disability

Life

Voluntary Benefits

Leave or Absence products

Scrum Master, SAFe or other relevant Agile certification.

Core Competencies and Leadership Style

Technical Curiosity

Engages deeply enough to understand the work, asks informed questions and keeps pace with engineers without trying to replace them.

Bias for Action

Moves issues toward resolution, convenes the right people quickly and follows through until the path is clear.

Clarity and Transparency

Separates facts from assumptions, makes ownership visible and communicates risks early and directly.

Constructive Challenge

Respectfully tests plans, requirements and sequencing when they are incomplete, unclear or disconnected from business outcomes.

Systems Thinking

Understands upstream and downstream impacts, shared components, environments and integration dependencies.

Accountability

Ensures commitments, decisions and action items have owners and are carried through to completion.

Adaptability

Replans quickly as architecture, requirements, priorities or dependencies evolve without losing control of the delivery narrative.

Collaborative Leadership

Builds trust across business and technology partners while ma