Scrum Master
Jersey City, NJ

Job Description

Role:

The Cloud Platforms: Core Development team develops software to automate and manage the infrastructure and services leveraged by TD Ameritrade business applications. This includes providing shared services such as authorization, logging, and application configuration management; application SDLC tools and workflows to manage the process from requirements to development to testing and deployment; and automation and inventory to provision the infrastructure itself.

The Scrum Master is a servant leader, helping the rest of the Scrum team progress. He/she keeps the Scrum team productive and learning. He/she must have a good understanding of the Scrum framework and the ability to train others to use it.

The Scrum Master is responsible for promoting Agile values and principles within the development team and the organization. The Scrum Master does anything possible to help the team perform at their highest level including but not limited to assist in removing impediments, facilitate meetings, and working with the product owner to make sure the product backlog is well groomed. The Scrum Master acts as a buffer between the team and any distracting influences.

Responsibilities:

* Assists the team by showing them their planned velocity vs. historical velocity, to make sure the targeted work can be accepted
* Helps Product Owner prepare through multiple levels of planning and road mapping discussions
* Reviews action items and next steps and holds team accountable for follow through
* Facilitates Sprint Reviews; Works with Product Owner and team to determine the agenda for the review
* Analyze and interpret sprint metrics
* Status reporting and communicating accomplishments, issues, and risks to product stakeholders
* Facilitates Sprint Retrospectives;
* Encourages other team members to facilitate
* Captures info and summarize as sprint planning input
* Backlog Refinement
* Helps Product Owner administer, prepare, groom, prioritize, and right-size the backlog
* Charges the team with what they need to accomplish and encourages the team to self-organize to accomplish the sprint goals
* Ensures the team is fully functional and productive
* Shields team from external interferences
* Identifies, eliminates, or escalates impediments
* Stays focused on delivery and quality, by encouraging teamwork and collaboration and minimizing silos and hand-offs
* Monitors team for:
* People working in isolation for more than a day
* Anyone making little visible progress
* Wait times or other wasteful processes
* Poor software engineering practices
* Infrequent builds
* Opportunities to amplify cross-training and "T" shaping
* Slippages in quality or velocity trends
* Application of agile principles and understanding and practicing of agility

Requirements:

General Skills

* Servant Leader: Must be able to garner respect from his/her team and be willing to get their hands dirty to get the job done
* Communicative and social: Must be able to communicate well with teams
* Facilitative: Must be able to lead and demonstrate value-add principles to a team
* Assertive: Must be able to ensure Agile/Scrum concepts and principles are adhered to, must be able to be a voice of reason and authority, make the tough calls
* Situationally aware: Must be the first to notice differences and issues as they arise and elevate them to management
* Continual improvement: Must continually be growing ones craft learning new tools and techniques to manage oneself and a team
* Conflict resolution: Must be able to facilitate discussion and encourage alternatives or different approaches

Technical Skills

* Understand basic fundamentals of iterative development as it pertains to adhering to an Agile methodology
* Understand basic fundamentals of software development processes and procedures
* Understand the value of commitments to delivery made by a development team
* Understand incremental delivery and the value of metrics
* Understand backlog tracking, burndown metrics, velocity, and task definition
* Familiarity with common Agile practices, Scrum service-oriented environments, and better development practices
* Must be able to work with other teams across the organization that do not have agile practices or operate in more legacy workflows (i.e. waterfall or ticket based/shared services)
* Ability to navigate complex release management environments and effective at planning and coordinating software releases at various intervals
* Familiarity with Agile tools/products such as JIRA, Confluence, Rally Pivotal, Clarity, etc. is a plus
* Ability to effectively break larger, more ambiguous work/stories into smaller more manageable work packages
* Familiarity with techniques such as user story mapping, personas and persona mapping, visual management and information radiators

Preferred Skills

* Experience as a Scrum Master for at least two years for a software development team that was diligently applying Scrum principles, practices, and theory
* Knowledge and/or experience with widely successful Agile techniques: User Stories, ATDD, TDD, Continuous Integration, Continuous Testing, Pairing, Automated Testing, and Agile Games
* Experience applying a wide variety of well documented patterns and techniques for filling in the intentional gaps left in the Scrum approach (e.g., numerous Burndown techniques, numerous Retrospective formats, handling bugs, etc.)
* Previous experience as a team lead
* First level Scrum Master certification: Scrum Alliance: Certified Scrum Master (CSM) or Scrum.org: Professional Scrum Master (PSM 1) preferred
* Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) certifications are a plus, but training can be provided by the firm

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