Agile SAFe Program Lead - NOAA Modeling Moonshot

Remote position with occasional on-site meetings in Silver Spring, Maryland; full-time supporting NOAA Office of Atmospheric Research. Public Trust eligibility required (U.S. citizenship). Core hours: 10:00 a.m.–3:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Employment contingent on contract award and government onboarding.

About the role

The Agile Program Lead will work directly with NOAA scientists, engineers, Product Owners, program officials, and operational stakeholders to strengthen planning, coordination, and incremental delivery across four interdependent Moonshot focus areas: numerical weather prediction, data assimilation, high-performance computing, software modernization, and artificial intelligence. Each Lead supports two related focus areas while managing dependencies across the broader program, adapting SAFe-informed Agile practices to scientific research and development without imposing unnecessary or uniform processes.

Responsibilities

• Facilitate planning, backlog refinement, demonstrations, reviews, retrospectives, and program-level events.
• Help establish team charters, roles, interfaces, working agreements, decision paths, and delivery cadences.
• Connect team backlogs and near-term activities to program milestones and research-to-operations outcomes.
• Identify and coordinate technical, organizational, resource, data, infrastructure, funding, and decision dependencies.
• Surface impediments, coordinate resolution, and escalate unresolved matters through established channels.
• Schedule and facilitate assigned meetings; prepare agendas and materials; document minutes, decisions, and actions; and conduct follow-up.
• Provide embedded Agile coaching, job aids, office hours, and facilitated practice tailored to scientific teams.
• Contribute accurate progress, risk, dependency, decision, and performance information to program dashboards and reports.
• Use retrospectives, performance measures, and stakeholder feedback to drive continuous improvement.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in a relevant business, technical, scientific, engineering, or management discipline.
• Experience facilitating Agile delivery for technical, scientific, software, data, cloud, engineering, or research teams.
• Demonstrated skill in backlog management, iterative planning, dependency coordination, impediment resolution, and stakeholder engagement.
• Ability to tailor Agile practices to teams with different missions, maturity levels, and delivery cadences.
• Experience with Jira, Smartsheet, or comparable planning and collaboration tools.
• Strong facilitation, communication, organization, and problem-solving skills.

Qualifications

• NOAA, Federal science, weather, climate, environmental, modeling, or high-performance-computing experience.
• Knowledge of SAFe, Scrum, Kanban, DevSecOps, scientific software development, or research-to-operations.
• SAFe, ScrumMaster, Agile coaching, Product Owner, PMP, or related certification.
• Familiarity with numerical weather prediction, data assimilation, AI/ML, scientific computing, or GPU-enabled software modernization.

Benefits

• Company-sponsored healthcare (medical, dental, and vision)
• Paid leave
• Retirement plan
• Training and professional development
• Remote and flexible work
• Performance-based raises and bonuses