Technical Scrum Master

About the role

This role combines strong Scrum facilitation, delivery discipline, and coding fluency to help teams plan effectively, identify technical risks early, remove blockers, and deliver reliable business systems.

Responsibilities

• Actively participate in technical discussions, architecture reviews, and code-level conversations during sprint cycles.
• Identify the root causes of technical blockers and propose or facilitate first-level solutions without always escalating to senior engineers.
• Review user stories and acceptance criteria for technical completeness, feasibility, testability, and dependency clarity before sprint commitment.
• Audit technical debt, code quality concerns, integration risks, data dependencies, and release risks as part of sprint planning conversations.
• Understand and articulate API dependencies, database structures, data flows, and system integration points relevant to sprint work.
• Collaborate with developers to decompose technically complex stories into actionable, estimable tasks.
• Serve as the first line of triage for routine technical questions so Engineering Leads can stay focused on higher-complexity design and delivery decisions.
• Facilitate Scrum ceremonies, including Sprint Planning, Daily Stand-ups, Sprint Reviews, Retrospectives, and backlog refinement sessions.
• Coach developers, QA engineers, Business Analysts, and Product Owners on Agile principles, Scrum best practices, and delivery discipline.
• Partner with Product Owners to maintain a technically sound, well-prioritized backlog.
• Drive adherence to Definition of Ready and Definition of Done across assigned teams.
• Protect the team from scope creep and external interruptions during active sprints.
• Drive continuous improvement through meaningful retrospectives that produce measurable action items.
• Support Agile maturity improvements and help scale best practices across business technology teams.
• Proactively surface and resolve blockers — technical, organizational, process-related, or cross-functional — before they impact sprint velocity.
• Coordinate cross-team dependencies across business systems, including ERP, CRM, LIS, billing, reporting, integrations, customer-facing platforms, and operational workflows.
• Facilitate alignment between Engineering, Product, QA, Business Analysts, Release teams, and stakeholders when delivery risks or blockers arise.
• Escalate risks appropriately when issues cannot be resolved within the team.
• Partner with Engineering, QA, Product, and Release teams to ensure sprint work is testable, demo-ready, and release-ready.
• Track UAT status, open defects, dependency closure, environment readiness, and go/no-go risks ahead of release milestones.
• Ensure completed stories meet agreed acceptance criteria and Definition of Done before closure.
• Maintain visibility into release risks, blockers, and cross-team dependencies through Jira, Confluence, RAID logs, or equivalent tools.
• Support delivery discipline in regulated healthcare technology environments where auditability, privacy, change control, and operational reliability are important.
• Track and report sprint health, velocity, burndown, cycle time, blockers, risks, dependencies, and technical debt trends.
• Communicate sprint progress, delivery risks, dependency status, and trade-offs clearly to business stakeholders and leadership.
• Prepare leadership-ready delivery updates that summarize accomplishments, risks, decisions needed, and upcoming priorities.
• Contribute to Agile maturity assessments and process improvement initiatives across business technology teams.
• Use metrics and retrospectives to identify delivery bottlenecks and recommend practical improvements.

Qualifications

• Requires a bachelor’s degree in computer science, information technology, business systems, engineering, or related fields.
• Certified Scrum Master certification required; CSM preferred.
• 3+ years of experience as a practicing Scrum Master on software delivery teams.
• Demonstrated ability to facilitate Scrum ceremonies for remote, hybrid, distributed, or cross-functional teams.
• Strong experience with Agile project management tools such as Jira, Azure DevOps, or equivalent.
• Experience partnering with Product Owners, Engineering Leads, QA, and Business Analysts to manage sprint execution, backlog readiness, dependencies, and delivery risks.
• Advanced Scrum certifications such as A-CSM, CSP-SM, PSM II, PSM III, SAFe Scrum Master, or SAFe Agilist.
• Background that bridges both development and delivery, such as a developer who transitioned into Agile leadership or technical delivery management.
• Experience in healthcare IT, laboratory information systems, regulated technology environments, or HIPAA-sensitive environments.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Familiarity with containerized deployments, including Docker or Kubernetes.
• Exposure to DevOps or delivery metrics such as DORA metrics, lead time, deployment frequency, cycle time, and mean time to recovery.
• Experience maintaining sprint boards, RAID logs, dependency trackers, Confluence documentation, and leadership-ready delivery updates.
• Experience supporting release readiness, UAT tracking, defect triage, deployment coordination, and go/no-go decision preparation.
• Coaching or mentoring experience with junior developers, Scrum teams, or Agile teams early in their maturity journey.