Scrum Master

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 is autonomous and accountable, delivering results, influencing senior stakeholders, and aligning cross-teams 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.

The core responsibilities for the job include the following:

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 standups, 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 prerelease 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. Update resource managers and Agile PMO leadership on any under- or overutilized resources.
• Ensure epics and stories are properly defined, prioritized, and meet functional and nonfunctional 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) updates 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 the 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 and 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, utilizing 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.

Requirements:

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