Lead Agilist - Scrum Master / Agile Coach

Position Overview

The Lead Agilist will support one or more Agile software delivery squads within Commercial IT, helping teams develop the behaviors, practices, and discipline required to become high-performing, self-organizing teams.

This is a hands-on Scrum Master / Agile Coach role, not a traditional Project Manager position. The successful candidate will coach teams, facilitate Agile practices, remove impediments, improve team dynamics, and promote continuous improvement while maintaining servant leadership.

Key Responsibilities

• Coach squads on Scrum principles, Agile values, and effective team behaviors.
• Facilitate Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Reviews, Retrospectives, and Backlog Refinement.
• Coach Product Owners on backlog management, prioritization, clarity, and business outcomes.
• Help teams become increasingly self-organizing and cross-functional.
• Identify and remove team impediments and escalate organizational barriers when appropriate.
• Facilitate conflict resolution and difficult team discussions.
• Help teams identify and manage cross-team dependencies.
• Create psychologically safe environments where issues can be surfaced and addressed.
• Use metrics, feedback loops, and team observations to drive continuous improvement.
• Protect teams from unnecessary external disruption while maintaining stakeholder communication.
• Promote collaboration, accountability, continuous learning, and delivery of business value.
• Introduce Kanban and other Agile practices when appropriate.
• Help teams identify, communicate, manage, and escalate risks.

Required Qualifications

• 3 years of hands-on Scrum experience.
• 5 years of overall professional/business experience.
• Strong understanding of the Scrum Framework and Agile principles.
• Hands-on experience facilitating Agile/Scrum events.
• Demonstrated experience coaching software delivery teams.
• Experience teaching Agile concepts and mentoring team members.
• Strong oral and written communication skills.
• Experience building or improving high-performing teams.
• Strong servant-leadership orientation.
• Experience identifying and removing team impediments.
• Experience handling conflict and facilitating difficult discussions.
• Ability to coach teams toward self-organization rather than directing their work.
• Understanding of Product Backlog management and Product Owner coaching.
• Experience using metrics and feedback loops for continuous improvement.
• Understanding of software development lifecycle disciplines.
• Bachelor's degree in Business, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline.

Preferred / Additional Experience

• Kanban, Scrumban, XP, or other Agile methodologies.
• CI/CD concepts.
• Test-Driven Development and automated testing.
• DevOps and pipeline automation.
• Cross-team dependency management.
• Organizational Agile coaching.
• Experience working in complex enterprise technology environments.

Ideal Candidate Profile

The strongest candidates will demonstrate real hands-on Scrum Master/Agile Coach experience, including team coaching, facilitation, servant leadership, conflict resolution, impediment removal, metrics-driven improvement, and coaching teams toward self-organization. Candidates whose experience is primarily traditional project/program management should not be considered a strong fit.