The Release Train Lead (RTL - defined as RTE on SAFe) is responsible for the servant leadership and delivery of key strategic initiatives within the IT branch at Air Canada. This role ensures coordination between multiple vendors, systems teams and products under the IT while also aligning with the overall IT Strategic Objectives. The incumbent works with external and internal stakeholders in addition to business units to leverage and propagate the project/program requirements, help manage risks and deliver continuous improvement for our customers.

Responsibilities:

• Partner with the delivery managers, architects, product owners, technology partners, subject matter experts, and scrum teams to monitor, track and provide oversight on the project.
• Facilitate the Product Implement planning events and establish the calendars for Iterations and Program Increments
• Assist in decision making by facilitating feature estimations by teams and publish for planning, visibility and transparency.
• Help manage risks and dependencies and appropriately escalate and track impediments, scope, prioritization, and delivery status.
• Responsible for ensuring new work is appropriately sized, prioritized and added to the backlog for prioritization and estimating. Ensures coordination of routines, processes, metrics and reporting, that support planning and delivery efforts.
• Partners with business users and drive development and provision of training, resolve questions, assess user needs and recommend changes.
• Ensure that all scheduling, and coordination processes (deliverables, resources, stakeholders, risks) run smoothly, as well as managing conflicts between projects, making trade-offs between competing requests and evaluating resources.
• Facilitate ART processes and ceremonies, including Release Planning, Sprint Planning, Sprint Reviews, and Retrospectives.
• Manage and optimize the flow of value through the ART, identifying and removing impediments to progress.
• Ensure effective coordination and communication across ART stakeholders, including teams, Scrum Masters, Product Owners, Delivery Managers and Product Management.
• Collaborate with Product Management and other stakeholders to prioritize and plan Program Increment (PI) objectives and features.
• Monitor program execution and progress, track performance metrics, and identify risks and issues to escalate as necessary.
• Helps Air Canada identify and on-board the appropriate blend of resources to meet the program needs and requirements.
• May interact with vendors, external industry participants, and regulatory agencies.

Qualifications

• A relevant University degree/technical certification, and/or relevant experience commensurate to the role
• 5 plus years of overall experience in IT, 5 or more years of experience working as Scrum Master, delivery lead or release train engineer.
• Certifications in Agile required(CSM), SAFe and CSP certification an asset.
• Experience working in Data & Analytics projects
• Strong understanding of Agile principles, values, and practices, with experience working in a SAFe environment.
• Experience with Agile and DevOps tools and processes, including JIRA, Confluence, and continuous integration and delivery pipelines.
• Proven ability to facilitate meetings and ceremonies, manage conflict, and negotiate outcomes.
• Demonstrated leadership and coaching skills, with the ability to motivate and inspire teams to achieve goals and objectives.
• Ability to work effectively under pressure and in rapidly changing environments or uncertain conditions.
• Demonstrates openness and willingness to adapt to different and new ways of doing things
• Takes responsibility for the results and actively participates in the future direction of the organization
• Ability to work cooperatively with others on a team, and to establish and maintain effective business relationships
• Demonstrate punctuality and dependability to support overall team success in a fast-paced environment

Conditions of Employment:

Candidates must be eligible to work in the country of interest at the time any offer of employment is made and are responsible for obtaining any required work permits, visas, or other authorizations necessary for employment. Prior to their start date, candidates will also need to provide proof of their eligibility to work in the country of interest.

Linguistic Requirements

Based on equal qualifications, preference will be given to bilingual candidates.

Diversity and Inclusion

Air Canada is strongly committed to Diversity and Inclusion and aims to create a healthy, accessible and rewarding work environment which highlights employees' unique contributions to our company's success.

As an equal opportunity employer, we welcome applications from all to help us build a diverse workforce which reflects the diversity of our customers, and communities, in which we live and serve.

Air Canada thanks all candidates for their interest; however only those selected to continue in the process will be contacted.