Scrum Master

Role Description

Reporting to an Agile Delivery Manager, the Scrum Master (P3) is accountable for end-to-end delivery leadership for a single scrum team within Ontada’s Technology Solutions portfolio. This role operates with autonomy and accountability, owning delivery outcomes, influencing senior stakeholders, and driving cross-team alignment in a regulated, enterprise environment.

We are seeking an experienced Scrum Master with hands-on expertise in SAFe, Scrum, and Kanban, who can operate effectively across product, engineering, UX, QA, and release management. The ideal candidate is proactive, execution focused, and comfortable driving continuous improvement while ensuring predictable, high-quality delivery.

Core Accountabilities

• Delivery Ownership and Accountability:
  • Own end-to-end delivery accountability across a single scrum team ensuring predictable, high-quality outcomes.
  • Establish and operate the delivery model, including sprint cadence, backlog readiness, planning, reviews, retrospectives, and release coordination.
  • Facilitate all agile ceremonies, including backlog refinement, daily stand‑ups, sprint planning, reviews/demos, and retrospectives.
  • Coach the Product Owner and team to ensure work items have clear scope, sizing, dependencies, risks, and acceptance criteria.
  • Define a sprint and release scope based on product prioritization and engineering capacity.
  • Lead integrated planning across product, engineering, UX, QA, and release management.
  • Lead pre‑release planning, including development, validation, and readiness of Release Scope Statements; assess capacity and communicate risks and dependencies.
  • Manage release‑level capacity planning, estimation, sequencing, and delivery tracking.
  • Ensure epics and stories are properly defined, prioritized, and meet functional and non‑functional requirements with approved acceptance criteria.
  • Proactively manage delivery risks, constraints, and dependencies; provide transparent milestone tracking and reporting.
  • Maintain accurate Jira updates, enforce Definition of Ready and Definition of Done, and ensure runbook updates are completed as required.
  • Lead non-prod WAR/MIM rooms to resolve time-sensitive non-production issues as needed for Dev, QA or Staging environments in preparation for upcoming releases.
  • Maintain accurate PlainView (PV) update for the scrum team with the corresponding project and product attributes.
  • Ensure weekly time-tracking is reported by the scrum team; facilitate review of the time tracking reports with the Leadership Team frequently.
• Stakeholder Management:
  • Serve as a liaison between Product Owners, Development Teams, and external stakeholders to maintain alignment on priorities and objectives.
  • Provide executive level communication on delivery status, risks, dependencies, and mitigation strategies.
  • Facilitate governance forums, milestone reviews, and executive checkpoints.
  • Partner closely with Product Owners and technical leaders to maintain a build ready backlog for next 3-6 sprints.
• Risk, Governance, and Compliance:
  • Proactively manage cross team dependencies and delivery impediments to protect release timelines.
  • Ensure adherence to governance and compliance standards, including Release Scope Statements, Scope Change Requests (SCRs), and ServiceNow change requests (CRs).
  • Lead risk identification and mitigation using ROAM or equivalent practices; escalate critical risks with clear mitigation plans.
  • Ensure required delivery evidence and artifacts are created by the team to support audits and regulatory requirements.
• Quality, Testing, and Release Readiness:
  • Coordinate overall testing readiness and execution in partnership with QA, including QA, UAT, regression, integration, and performance testing.
  • Ensure all testing requirements (including NFRs) are defined, tracked, and aligned with exit criteria.
  • Ensure timely creation, review, and approval of testing artifacts (e.g., test strategy, test plans).
  • Coordinate integration testing readiness, including external vendors and system dependencies.
  • Drive effective defect management, including prioritization, closure, and root cause analysis.
  • Support planning activities to align team capacity with release objectives.
• Continuous Improvement & Agile Coaching:
  • Coach and mentor scrum teams on agile practices, ADLC maturity, and enterprise delivery standards, raising overall delivery maturity.
  • Champion continuous agile maturity improvement across teams, utilize delivery metrics, KPIs, and dashboards.
  • Analyze delivery trends to identify systemic improvements.
  • Contribute to the evolution of Ontada’s Agile Delivery Lifecycle (ADLC) and enterprise delivery practices.

Qualifications

• Degree or equivalent and typically requires 4+ years of relevant experience.

Requirements

• 4+ years of experience leading large scale agile delivery for complex technology initiatives; consulting experience strongly preferred.
• Demonstrated success in Scrum Master, Project Manager, or hybrid delivery leadership roles.
• Proven ability to manage a scrum team, dependencies, and stakeholders in fast paced, regulated environments.
• Strong executive communication skills, with experience engaging Directors, VPs, and senior leaders.
• Expert level experience managing scope, timelines, and delivery commitments.
• Solid understanding of technical architecture and product roadmaps to effectively support engineering teams.
• Experience enabling engineering best practices, including CI/CD, DevOps, automated testing, and code quality standards.
• Experience working with modern software engineering teams (web, cloud, APIs, microservices).
• Proficiency with delivery and collaboration tools such as Jira, Confluence, Miro, or similar.
• Deep knowledge of Scrum framework, roles, ceremonies, artifacts, and principles.
• Strong organizational, time management, and prioritization skills.
• Certified Scrum Master (CSM) or equivalent certification from a recognized industry organization.
• Proactively manages end-to-end JIRA process improvements, including access, configuration, and optimization of Jira, Confluence, and other required business tools.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation package as part of Total Rewards.
• Pay range: $103,200 - $172,000.
• Additional compensation opportunities such as annual bonuses or long-term incentives.