Scrum Master

About the position

Leidos is hiring an energetic, motivated, innovative individual to be a part of our team supporting Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in Baltimore, MD. The Scrum Master works closely with the Program team, CMS Partners, and CMS Stakeholders to manage, maintain, and optimize project and service delivery to best support CMS and the general public. The Scrum Master will deliver solutions that ultimately ensure that the functions of Medicare, Medicaid, and Marketplace are carried out for the US citizen and contribute to efforts to reduce healthcare costs.

Responsibilities

• Facilitate daily stand-ups, sprint planning, refinement, sprint review, retrospectives, and other related team and intra-team meetings.
• Participate in sprint demonstrations and scrum of scrums.
• Maintain and generate information radars for the teams.
• Collect and share team metrics with the team, suggest new metrics, and drive improvement using metrics.
• Ensure that goals, scope, and product domain are understood by everyone on the team.
• Ensure that the technical team has a clear understanding of Definition of Done.
• Drive stories to Ready state in preparation for the next quarter and upcoming sprint.
• Prepare for sprint planning with the product owner and the team.
• Work with the team and Product Owner/Manager to maintain a healthy backlog and plan upcoming releases and assist with drafting acceptance criteria.
• Foster team collaboration and timely communication.
• Encourage the team to be proactive during all phases of the sprint.
• Work with the team to adapt to changes that yield better results.
• Encourage an experimental and fail-fast mindset.
• Remove impediments to the team’s ability to perform by working closely with the team and stakeholders.
• Communicate the status of progress and impediments to internal and external stakeholders.
• Facilitate cross-team coordination, tracking and following up with external dependencies.
• Act as a buffer between external distractions and the team helping the team to keep focus.
• Coordinate with the configuration management analyst on environment setups & maintenance, code deployments, and production releases.
• Build high-performing teams by helping the team manage interpersonal conflicts, challenges, and opportunities for growth.
• Create a fun sharing and learning environment, experimenting with various ideas to improve delivery including pair-programming and cross-functional training.
• Promote teamwork to achieve sprint goals.
• Lead the teams towards agile maturity.
• Capture agile metrics as required.

Requirements

• BS and 5+ years of prior relevant experience or Masters with 3+ years of prior relevant experience.
• Experience applying scrum and growing teams as a fulltime Scrum Master for 5 years or more.
• Experience-affecting change in organizations working towards agile adoption.
• Certified Scrum Master (CSM) or similar agile project management certification (PMI-ACP).
• Experience using agile project management tools, preferably JIRA and Confluence.
• Excellent written, verbal, and interpersonal communication skills.
• Manages time extremely well, can quickly sense when an issue needs to be discussed or triaged.
• Strong attention to detail and focus on task completion is critical.

Nice-to-haves

• Technology experience software development.
• Experience working in with multi-disciplinary development teams.
• Relevant understanding of CMMI Level 4 Concepts.
• SAFe experience is a plus.
• Experience as a Scrum Master at an organization that is committed to using agile as a core methodology to deliver business value.
• Experience in any part of the software development lifecycle is a plus.
• Experience with applying test automation, test-driven development, continuous integration, and continuous deployment to achieve built-in quality by the teams.
• Ability to obtain a public trust clearance.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation.
• Health and Wellness programs.
• Income Protection.
• Paid Leave.
• Retirement.