Sr. Scrum Master (Raleigh, NC- only)

Scrum Master, SeniorThe Portfolio Performance Engineering (PPE) Team represents a centralized domain responsible for managing holdings, investment performance, and automated rebalancing across the universe of investment portfolios within Schwab. The PPE Team is looking for a Scrum Master, Senior who will excel in a dynamic fast-paced environment. PPE offers a wide range of technology opportunities for the best and brightest people to grow and demonstrate their skills as they develop high-performance financial applications.The Scrum Master has a hands-on role in managing the Scrum process within software development teams. They help their teams adopt and improve on the Scrum methodology. They coach their teams to higher levels of maturity by continually improving their process and ensuring that they adhere to the Scrum framework. They lead efforts to get Scrum training for all members of their team (Product Owners, developers, QA, business analysts, managers, stakeholders, etc.) They serve as the Scrum framework authority for their teams and evangelize and educate their teams on, not only the process, but the benefits of following the process.As a servant-leader, the Scrum Master leads dedicated teams to deliver business value through their development and delivery execution. He/she works with Product Owners to ensure the appropriate development and delivery of the prioritized backlog. Scrum Masters have above average communication and facilitation skills, are well organized, and exhibit above average follow-up and follow-through skills. They facilitate discussion, decision making and conflict resolution. They evangelize, demonstrate, and live the Agile values and principles as stated in the Agile Manifesto.What you are good at:Be a servant leader: You receive as much satisfaction from facilitating others' success as your own.Remove impediments: You do everything in your power to remove obstacles that are preventing the team from accomplishing its Sprint goals.Radiate information: You make sure that all information needed to ensure the team's progress and successes are highly visible to all stakeholders, including the team itself (e.g., backlogs, burndown/up charts, etc.)Support the Product Owner: You work to assist the Product Owner, through communicating updates and removing impediments, assisting with backlog and release plan maintenance, etc.Facilitate creativity and empowerment for the development team: You foster an environment where creativity and empowerment can flourish.Improve the team's engineering practices and tools as needed: You make sure teams have the tools and know-how they need to succeed.Communicate, communicate, communicate. You ensure that everyone-the Product Owner, the team, and various other stakeholders-are always up-to-speed.Act as a Scrum Master for 2+ Agile teams simultaneously.Provide leadership, direction and coaching to the team by encouraging them to adopt and mature good Scrum processes according to the Scrum Guide.Create an environment whereby the team is motivated, self-organizing and self-sufficient.Organize and facilitate effective Scrum meetings: backlog grooming, Sprint planning, daily Scrum, Sprint review, and Sprint retrospective.Encourage your teams to routinely inspect and adapt.Assist the team in establishing a consistent and predictable team level cadence (predictable velocity)Identify and facilitate the removal of team impediments and escalate as appropriate.Work with and coach Product Owners to develop, manage, and continuously groom the team's product backlog.In partnership with the Product Owner, track and communicate to Stakeholders information such as team velocity, Sprint/release progress, impediments, team successes, etc.In coordination with Project Managers, facilitate cross-team coordination and collaboration when projects require it.Assist Product Owners and Project Managers with planning and grooming activities.What you have:7+ years of experience as a Scrum Master.7+ years of experience in a software development environment preferably involving cross-team dependencies.5+ years of experience owning and managing customer expectations, project schedules, status and reporting and change management.Scrum Master certificationServant Leadership - Able to garner respect from your teams, lead and demonstrate value-add principles, and willing and able to get your hands dirty to get the job done.Communicative and social skills - Able to communicate well with your Teams.Enthusiasm and high-energy.Continual improvement - Constantly learning new tools and techniques to grow your craft, yourself, and your Teams.Attitude of transparency - Desire and ability to bring disclosure and transparency to the business about development and grow trust between the business and development.Fully educated and conversant on the Scrum process according to the Scrum Guide.A thorough understanding and appreciation for the Agile values and principles.Thorough understanding of:Backlog grooming and relative estimatingRelease planningSprint planningScrum metrics such as Sprint burndown, release burnup, & velocity, to name a fewSprint review best practices and techniquesA variety of retrospective techniquesHave led teams in a large, complex enterprise environment where successful projects potentially involve more than 1 Scrum team.Ability to apply a wide variety of patterns and techniques to enable the team to achieve successAbility to use standard office tools, like Microsoft Teams, Outlook, browsers, and cut & paste toolsKnowledge of project management fundamentals.Conflict resolution: Able to facilitate discussion of issues and different approaches and alternatives, and effectively resolve issues in a timely manner.Facilitate: Able to lead and demonstrate value-add principles to a team.Assertive: Able to ensure Agile and Scrum concepts and principles are adhered to, be a voice of reason and authority, and make the tough calls.Situationally aware: Be the first to notice differences and issues as they arise and elevate them as appropriate.Attitude of empowerment: Able to lead a team to self-organization.Strong grasp of software development and technology.Solid time management and organizational skillsExperience with Atlassian Tool set (JIRA, Confluence, JQL)Experience with 1 or more scaled Agile frameworks (SAFe, LeSS, DAD, Nexus)Experience with running quarterly product incremental planning sessions for multiple teamsDesired:Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering or related field, or related experience.Have acted as a traditional project and/or program manager in the past.DevOps experience: continuous integration, continuous build, continuous delivery tools and techniques.