Senior Scrum Master

Role Overview

The Senior Scrum Master owns the Agile delivery health, team operating rhythm, execution discipline, and continuous-improvement practices for one or more complex cross-functional delivery teams. This is not a ceremony-only role. The Scrum Master coaches Product Owners and delivery teams, drives sprint readiness and predictable flow, removes impediments, surfaces dependencies and risks early, uses delivery data to improve outcomes, and connects team-level execution to integrated program milestones and release commitments.

Key Responsibilities

1. Establish and maintain the team Agile operating model, working agreements, sprint cadence, Definition of Ready, Definition of Done, and delivery practices aligned with broader program governance.

2. Facilitate sprint planning, backlog refinement, daily Scrum, sprint reviews, retrospectives, and other team sessions with a focus on clear decisions, commitments, actions, and measurable improvement rather than ceremony administration.

3. Coach Product Owners, Business Analysts, architects, developers, QA, UX, and other team members on backlog readiness, story decomposition, acceptance criteria, capacity planning, prioritization, and realistic sprint commitments.

4. Use delivery metrics such as throughput, cycle time, aging work, carryover, planned-versus-completed work, defects, and velocity trends to identify bottlenecks, improve predictability, and drive continuous improvement without using metrics as individual performance measures.

5. Identify and remove impediments, surface cross-team dependencies and delivery risks early, establish accountable owners and dates, and escalate blockers outside the team's control through the Lead Project Manager and program governance structure.

6. Coordinate dependencies and sequencing across Salesforce, integrations, data migration, security, environments, testing, change, and release teams, including participation in Scrum-of-Scrums, dependency reviews, and release-readiness activities.

7. Protect sprint focus and sustainable delivery by making scope changes, production issues, unplanned work, and competing priorities visible and partnering with Product Owners and delivery leadership to make explicit tradeoff decisions.

8. Coach teams toward stronger self-management, accountability, collaboration, conflict resolution, and continuous improvement while supporting SIT/UAT readiness, defect resolution, release execution, cutover, hypercare, and transition to support.

9. Use client-provided or client-approved AI acceleration tools when appropriate for delivery analysis, backlog and documentation support, meeting synthesis, testing, and defect analysis. Independently validate all AI-generated outputs for accuracy, security, maintainability, privacy, and compliance.

Required Qualifications

1. 8+ years of relevant enterprise Agile delivery experience, including 5+ years serving as a Scrum Master, Senior Scrum Master, Agile Delivery Lead, or comparable role on complex technology transformation programs.

2. Deep practical knowledge of Scrum and Agile delivery, with demonstrated experience improving team flow, predictability, quality, accountability, and delivery outcomes beyond simply facilitating ceremonies.

3. Strong experience with backlog and sprint readiness, story decomposition, capacity planning, Definition of Ready and Definition of Done, dependency management, impediment removal, defect management, and release coordination.

4. Experience using Jira, Azure DevOps, or comparable enterprise delivery tools and using quantitative delivery metrics to identify bottlenecks, communicate team health, and drive specific improvement actions.

5. Demonstrated ability to coordinate cross-functional onshore and offshore teams and work effectively with Product Owners, Business Analysts, architects, developers, QA, UX, release teams, vendors, and program leadership.

6. Strong facilitation, coaching, negotiation, conflict-resolution, and influencing skills, including the ability to challenge teams and Product Owners constructively while promoting ownership and self-management.

7. Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, including experience communicating delivery risks, dependencies, tradeoffs, and improvement actions clearly to client stakeholders and senior delivery leaders.

Preferred Qualifications

1. Experience supporting Salesforce, CRM, CIS, or other large enterprise platform transformations; exposure to Service Cloud, Energy & Utilities Cloud, OmniStudio or OmniScript, Data Cloud, or complex Salesforce integration programs is strongly preferred.

2. Utility, regulated-industry, customer information system, customer-service transformation, or clean-energy program experience.

3. Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), Advanced Certified ScrumMaster (A-CSM), Professional Scrum Master (PSM I/II), SAFe Scrum Master, PMI-ACP, or comparable Agile delivery credential.

4. Experience supporting greenfield implementations, multi-vendor delivery, distributed teams, and enterprise test, release, cutover, and production-transition activities.