Scrum Master

Blackstone Talent Group, an award-winning technology consulting and talent agency is seeking a Scrum Master to join our Client's team.

Looking for a Scrum Master to join a high performing agile team that uses the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) methodology to support a nationally significant and fast-paced program.

This role requires an experienced Agile Scrum Master to work on a large-scale software and hardware integration effort. The selected candidate will be responsible for facilitating either one large, complex agile team, or several small agile teams as part of a larger Agile Release Train (ART) delivering value to the customer using Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) as the agile framework. She/he will help educate the teams in Scrum or Kanban to ensure that the agile processes are being followed. She/he will help remove impediments and foster an environment for high-performing team dynamics, continuous flow, and relentless improvement. The selected candidate will work with team members, with other Agile Scrum Masters, and with support personnel to ensure that the team's commitments at the Program Increment (PI) Planning are met. She/he/they will facilitate horizontal communication across team members to identify any impediments that may prevent team progress while working mitigation plans. The selected candidate will be responsible for sensing, determining, and leading discussions when issues need to be analyzed or triaged, and for making improvements in determining and implementing improvements to processes. Strong attention to detail and focus on task completion is critical.

Responsibilities:

• Responsible for facilitating self-organizing team(s) to ensure the team is making progress against Program Increment commitments.
• Protect the team from scope creep during the execution of the PI.
• Remove impediments for the team and coordinate with the Release Train Engineers in implementing solutions.
• Help team members communicate, coordinate, and cooperate.
• Support and enforce the Scrum process and other rules.
• Ensure that the team has a clear understanding of the Definition of Done and how to meet it.
• Coordinate with other teams on the Agile Release Trains (ARTs) and communicate status to management.
• Work with the Product Owner/s to review and prioritize features.
• Lead and facilitate SAFe ceremonies to include sprint planning, sprint review, demos, sprint retro, and PI planning.
• Work with Product Owner/s to develop User Stories to meet the Feature acceptance criteria.
• Maintain and generate information radiators for the teams.
• Collect and share team metrics with the team, determine when new metrics are needed, and develop improvements in metrics.
• Coach teams on agile and scrum principles with the goal of continuous improvement.
• Observe team dynamics, recognize strengths and weaknesses of individual team members' contributions, and coach the team as a whole to drive improvements in productivity.
• Create a fun sharing and learning environment, and experiment with various ideas to improve delivery, including pair programming and cross-functional training.
• Promote teamwork to achieve sprint goals.
• Lead teams towards agile maturity.

Required Qualifications:

• Clearance: TS/SCI w CI Poly 
• Experience working as a Scrum Master for software development or similar technical team or teams.
• Certified Scrum Master (CSM), SAFe Scrum Master (SSM) or similar agile project management certification (PMI-ACP).
• Experience using agile project management tools (e.g. Jira, VersionOne, Rallye, IBM RTC).
• Excellent written, verbal, and interpersonal communication skills and time management skills are a must.
• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment, across diverse systems and groups.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in a technical field such as System Engineering, Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering Science, Engineering Management, or related discipline.
• Experience working with large software systems including hardware integration and test.
• Experience working with multi-disciplinary technical development teams.
• Experience using SAFe as the agile development methodology.
• Experience-affecting change in organizations working towards agile adoption.
• Experience applying test automation, test-driven development, continuous integration, and continuous deployment to achieve built-in quality by the team.
• Experience using Kanban as a means to improve flow on support teams

Security Clearance Required: TS/SCI CI Poly

Blackstone Talent Group is a wholly owned subsidiary of Blackstone Technology Group, a global IT services and software firm that implements technological solutions across commercial industry verticals and the US Federal Government. Blackstone's global talent augmentation practice was founded in 1998. Blackstone Talent Group has offices in San Francisco, Denver, Houston, Colorado Springs, and Washington, DC. We specialize in providing clients the best talent across a variety of industries and sectors.

EOE of Minorities/Females/Veterans/Disabilities