Job DescriptionThe Impact You will have in this role:
The Scrum Master Associate Director is a servant leader with a growth mindset, responsible for facilitating squad delivery while ensuring proper governance of process. They are responsible for acting as a trusted coach, guiding the squad during ceremonies, removing impediments, and embodying Our Ways of Working. Additionally, Scrum Master takes the lead in maintaining the accuracy of, JIRA and governance artifacts in addition to promoting, improving, training, mentoring and adopting project management and scrum mastery best practices. As an Associate Director, the Principal Scrum Master is expected to be a leader on the team and in the community of Scrum Masters.
Your Primary Responsibilities:Agile Leadership and Facilitation - Lead Agile ceremonies, including daily stand-ups, sprint planning, backlog refinement, sprint reviews, retrospectives, and other team working sessions.
- Coach teams on Scrum, Agile principles, and effective delivery practices to improve consistency, predictability, and outcomes.
- Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, transparency, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
- Identify and implement opportunities to improve team processes, meeting effectiveness, and overall Agile maturity.
- Adapt Agile practices as appropriate while maintaining strong governance and delivery discipline.
- As an Associate Director, serve as a leader within the Scrum Master community, providing guidance, sharing best practices, and supporting the development of other Scrum Masters.
Delivery Management - Partner closely with Product Owners, Engineering Leads, and other stakeholders to ensure priorities, scope, milestones, and delivery expectations are clearly understood.
- Track sprint, release, and milestone commitments and proactively identify risks that may impact delivery.
- Maintain visibility into planned versus actual delivery, addressing gaps and escalating material concerns when appropriate.
- Help teams develop realistic delivery plans based on capacity, dependencies, technical complexity, and competing priorities.
- Coordinate activities across teams and stakeholders to support major releases and production deployments.
- Drive accountability for delivery commitments while helping teams navigate changing priorities and business needs.
Risk, Issue, and Dependency Management - Proactively identify and manage risks, issues, assumptions, and dependencies that may affect delivery.
- Ensure risks and issues have clear owners, mitigation plans, target dates, and appropriate follow-through.
- Facilitate cross-team discussions when dependencies require coordinated planning, decision-making, or escalation.
- Escalate significant delivery risks early, clearly articulating potential impact and recommended mitigation.
- Work with teams and stakeholders to resolve dependencies before they become delivery blockers.
Metrics and Continuous Improvement - Monitor and interpret delivery metrics such as velocity, sprint predictability, throughput, cycle time, aging work, defects, and commitment completion.
- Use metrics and delivery trends to identify potential risks, bottlenecks, and opportunities for improvement.
- Facilitate data-driven conversations with teams and stakeholders rather than simply reporting metrics.
- Identify recurring delivery challenges and facilitate root-cause analysis to determine sustainable improvements.
- Ensure improvement actions identified through retrospectives and other forums are tracked through completion.
Stakeholder Management and Communication - Provide clear, concise, and timely delivery updates to stakeholders and leadership.
- Communicate milestone status, risks, dependencies, key decisions, and required actions.
- Facilitate alignment across Product, Engineering, Architecture, Risk, and other partner teams.
- Maintain effective communication between individual squads and broader programs or strategic initiatives.
- Support leadership reporting, governance forums, and delivery reviews as required.
- Navigate competing priorities and facilitate constructive conversations to drive alignment and timely decision-making.
Team Coaching and Development - Coach teams on effective Agile behaviors, collaboration, accountability, and ways of working.
- Partner with Product Owners to strengthen backlog quality, prioritization, refinement, and readiness.
- Help teams resolve delivery challenges and facilitate constructive discussions when priorities, ownership, or responsibilities are unclear.
- Mentor and support Scrum Masters, sharing practical Agile delivery practices and lessons learned across teams.
- Promote consistent Agile delivery practices while recognizing where teams may require different approaches based on maturity, complexity, and business needs.
**NOTE: The Primary Responsibilities of this role are not limited to the details above. **
Qualifications: - Minimum of 8 years of related experience
- Bachelor's degree preferred or equivalent experience
Talents Needed for Success: - Working knowledge of agile methodology
- Understanding of the end-to-end Institutional post trade Derivatives lifecycle highly desirable
- Experience with similar business/application messaging systems and protocols (e.g., SQL, MQ, Sftp, MS azure, XLST) an advantage
The salary range is indicative for roles at the same level within DTCC across all US locations. Actual salary is determined based on the role, location, individual experience, skills, and other considerations.
