Scrum Master (DevOps)

Assurant is a global provider of lifestyle and housing solutions that help leading brands grow revenue, manage risk and deliver a great experience for their customers. We protect, connect, and support over 300 million consumers worldwide, helping people get more value from their connected devices, vehicles, and homes. Assurant is a proud member of the Fortune 300, with decades of experience in the industries we serve.

For more information, please visit https://www.assurant.com/

As experienced but still learning Scrum Master, you will have the ability to achieve broadly communicated objectives under a minimal amount of supervision. This role will provide effective collaboration, facilitation, leadership and coaching skills to the agile development process and delivery of applications, as well as enforcing the agile tenants, removing impediments and promoting empowerment.

This is a remote position.

Responsibilities:

• Articulate the difference between Agile and Scrum
• Provide team with resources, information, communication, and practical advice to enable the team to regularly deliver working software
• Facilitates: Daily scrum (stand-up), release and sprint planning sessions, Sprint review (demo) and Sprint retrospective. Ensure all participants understand the ceremony's purpose and keep to the time-box.
• Track and communicate team velocity and sprint/release progress
• Foster and encourage conversations and collaboration - both inside and outside of team – allowing them to self-organize
• Identify and remove impediments, prevent distractions that interfere with the ability of the team to deliver the sprint goal
• Understand and be able to articulate strategic and product planning and goals in the team's environment and progress toward them
• Supports Product Owner ensuring the product backlog is properly refined – prioritizing to maximize value and using creative techniques for elaborating user stories to be ready for the upcoming 1-2 sprints.
• Assist team with making appropriate commitments through story selection, task definition
• Ensure team understands the need for clear and concise Product Backlog items and achieve this through techniques such as user story slicing and acceptance criteria
• Proactively manage dependencies
• Update agile tracking systems to provide transparency on Product & Sprint Backlogs
• Recommend improvements and assist in changes to best practice
• Participate in the agile community both internal to Assurant and external with other practitioners
• Enforces the values and principles of Agile by focusing on continuous learning and feedback loops

Basic Qualifications:

• 4 years of experience as a Scrum Master for software development teams
• DevOps and Infrastructure experience is desired

Other Requirements:

• Agile experience within a multi-team organization
• Experience working with distributed, virtual teams
• Excellent communication, facilitation, and coaching skills
• Advanced understanding of Agile practices such as: retrospectives, daily standups, sprint planning, burn down techniques
• Experience with agile team tools such as Jira, VersionOne or Azure DevOps
• Ability to collaborate and exercise influence without authority

Preferred Qualifications:

• 6 years of experience as a Scrum Master for software development teams
• Certified Scrum Master (CSM) or Professional Scrum Master (PSM) Industry certification or SAFe Scrum Master Certification (SSM)
• Bachelor’s Degree or higher