Scrum Master

Your opportunity

At Schwab, you’re empowered to make an impact on your career. Here, innovative thought meets creative problem solving, helping us “challenge the status quo” and transform the finance industry together.

We believe in the importance of in-office collaboration and fully intend for the selected candidate for this role to work on site in the specified location(s).

The Scrum Master will play a key role within Schwab’s Digital Advisor Onboarding team, supporting the Digital Onboarding system. The Scrum Master is a servant leader who provides effective collaboration, facilitation, leadership, and coaching to support an interdisciplinary software development team, the agile development process, and the delivery of value. As an agile expert, the Scrum Master is responsible for enforcing agile tenets as interpreted by the teams, removing impediments, and promoting empowerment and continuous improvement. This position carries a high level of responsibility and accountability and will challenge scrum master to continuously improve agile best practices. The role requires a strong understanding of the software development life cycle, development processes, and technology. 

Responsibilities include managing scrum ceremonies, preparing teams for program increment planning, communicating release status to stakeholders, coordinating with the Product Owner, helping teams manage risk, and improving overall product development processes to enable teams to build and deliver products efficiently and effectively. 

What you’re good at 

• Organizing and facilitating team ceremonies and fostering team interactions and dynamics that enable the delivery of value to internal and external clients
• Coaching and enabling teams on Agile processes to become self-organized, including facilitating daily stand-ups, reviews, sprint and release planning, demos, and other Scrum-related meetings
• Organizing sprint retrospectives and guiding teams on their continuous improvement journey
• Assisting teams in making appropriate commitments through story selection and task definition
• Adapting project scope, schedules, and resource assignments as needed throughout projects to respond to emerging requirements and risks
• Facilitating discussion and conflict resolution
• Ensuring the team strives to make each increment of functionality potentially releasable
• Recommending improvements and assisting with changes to leading practices
• Updating agile tracking systems to provide transparency on product and sprint backlogs
• Assisting with internal and external communication, improving transparency, and effectively radiating information
• Participating in the organization and planning of the development schedule using established methodologies to create a cohesive plan with identifiable platform dependencies and major milestones, while managing agreed-upon user stories and schedules to ensure successful completion within scope, budget, timeline, and quality parameters
• Tracking and communicating team velocity and sprint/release progress
• Supporting development and software delivery
• Promoting team self-organization and optimization while removing distractions and impediments
• Empowering teams to self-organize
• Improving the productivity of sprint teams
• Identifying and removing impediments and preventing distractions that interfere with the team’s ability to achieve sprint goals
• Supporting development engineers and project leads as needed
• Role-modeling Schwab leadership behaviors and coaching teams to practice agile principles and values across people, process, and technology
• Ensuring development teams practice core agile principles, including collaboration, prioritization, team accountability, and visibility
• Supporting an agile-based software development life cycle by helping create and maintain necessary standards, tools, and best practices

What you have

Required Qualifications:

• 5+ years as a Scrum Master
• 7+ years of overall technology experience
• Project Management experience using Scrum or Kanban
• Experience in coaching and leading teams new to Agile
• Must be an excellent team leader with the ability to absorb pressure, influence, and negotiate
• Understanding of software engineering principles and exposure to varied technology stacks
• Experience using Work Tracking Tools (ex. Jira, Confluence, RALLY is a Plus)
• Experience with highly complex project systems and working with various other domains to ensure integrated planning of development and testing is adhered to
• Experience with collaborating with and communicating to various levels of stakeholders and management
• Experience with negotiating prioritization between Product Owners and Technical leadership
• Experience working with agile methodology on large scale, technically complex projects for a large enterprise

Preferred Qualifications

• Highly adaptable to a constantly changing environment
• Must have the requisite software development knowledge or experience to coach and guide team members on how to improve their skills
• Must have exceptional communication, organization, and time management skills
• Excellent interpersonal skills and ability to work with diverse and a geographically dispersed team
• Must be self-motivated, as well as, creative and efficient in proposing solutions to complex, time-critical problems
• Must be collaborative in driving decisions and able to deal with all levels of management and stakeholders