Scrum Master / Kanban Coach

We are seeking an experienced Scrum Master / Kanban Coach to drive agile delivery, release management, engineering quality, and continuous improvement across software engineering teams. The ideal candidate will combine strong Agile/SAFe expertise with technical literacy and hands-on experience managing end-to-end release processes.

Roles and Responsibilities

* Facilitate Agile ceremonies including sprint planning, daily stand-ups, reviews, retrospectives, PI Planning, System Demos, Inspect & Adapt, and Scrum of Scrums.
* Manage team backlogs in Azure DevOps, ensuring clear acceptance criteria, dependencies, priorities, and technical context.
* Track and communicate delivery and engineering metrics such as velocity, burndown, cycle time, deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, and MTTR.
* Own the release calendar and release management lifecycle, including code freezes, regression windows, go/no-go checkpoints, rollback plans, and environment promotion from INT to CERT to PROD.
* Enforce release gates covering regression testing, test coverage, code quality, security scans, and complete deployment traceability.
* Work with SonarQube, Veracode, GitHub, and CI/CD pipelines to ensure engineering and security quality standards are met.
* Manage enterprise change processes using ServiceNow, CAB, CR/CHG/CRQ, and PRR workflows.
* Own production incident RCA processes, ensuring systemic issues are identified and corrective/preventive actions are tracked to completion.
* Proactively identify and escalate delivery and technical risks including environment issues, upstream dependencies, API changes, and pipeline failures.
* Drive automated testing adoption, including unit testing, integration testing, API contract validation, and code coverage improvements.
* Track technology modernization initiatives and technical debt, ensuring visibility, prioritization, and progress through the backlog.
* Coach teams on Agile/Kanban principles, self-organization, continuous improvement, sustainable delivery, and effective flow management.
* Maintain comprehensive release audit trails including release notes, deployment records, test evidence, and incident postmortems.
* Monitor post-deployment application health using Azure Monitor, Application Insights, and Splunk.
* Shield delivery teams from unnecessary disruptions, scope creep, and external blockers while maintaining transparency with stakeholders.

Required Qualifications

* 5+ years of experience as a Scrum Master, Agile Delivery Lead, Kanban Coach, or Technical Project Manager within software engineering environments.
* Strong experience owning end-to-end release management and delivery processes.
* Hands-on experience with Azure DevOps including Boards, Dashboards, Queries, and backlog management.
* Experience with GitHub, CI/CD pipelines, API contracts, SQL, and cloud technologies.
* Strong understanding of environment promotion, code freezes, regression testing, release gates, and rollback procedures.
* Experience with ServiceNow, CAB, CR/CHG/CRQ, and enterprise change management.
* Experience with SAFe or other scaled Agile frameworks, including PI Planning.
* Strong understanding of Agile, Scrum, and Kanban practices and team coaching.
* Experience driving engineering quality practices, automated testing, code coverage, and release governance.
* Proven experience managing RCA and corrective/preventive action processes for production incidents.
* Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to translate technical risks and delivery status into clear business-level updates.