Scrum Master — Application Build
Position Summary
The Scrum Master runs delivery for the engineering team building an operator application in a cyber command center supporting national cyber defense across Critical Infrastructure, State, Local, Tribal and Territorial, and Federal Civilian Executive Branch partners.
The team spans front-end, visualization, service, design, and platform engineering, delivering a modular application against a fixed date, with dependencies on teams outside its own. Sequencing and dependency resolution are the substance of this role; ceremony is the mechanism, not the purpose.
Key Responsibilities
Sprint Execution
- Run sprint planning, daily coordination, review, and retrospective to a consistent standard
- Maintain sprint scope discipline and protect the team from unplanned work entering mid-sprint
- Track velocity and completion honestly, including where commitments were missed
- Keep the team's working agreements current and enforced
Backlog & Priority Management
- Maintain the backlog so work is defined, estimated, and ordered before it enters a sprint
- Work with stakeholders to keep priority explicit and to resolve competing demands before they reach the team
- Ensure acceptance criteria are clear enough that completion is not a matter of opinion
- Break down work spanning design, service, and interface into increments deliverable and demonstrable together
Sequencing & Dependency Management
- Sequence delivery across functional areas built in parallel, each depending on its own backing service
- Identify dependencies on the data engineering and platform teams early and drive them to resolution
- Manage the design-to-engineering pipeline so design decisions land ahead of the sprint that needs them
- Track technical and delivery risk and elevate with enough lead time for the escalation to matter
Delivery Reporting
- Report delivery status accurately to program leadership, including where the schedule is at risk
- Maintain metrics that reflect delivery reality rather than activity
- Support program-level reporting obligations and customer demonstrations of working capability
Team Health & Process Improvement
- Remove impediments the team cannot clear itself
- Use retrospectives to produce specific changes rather than general observations
- Support onboarding of engineers joining the team and improve delivery practice as the team matures
- Obtain and maintain the training and certifications required for the position. Certification currency is tracked and reported to the customer monthly.
Required Qualifications
- Experience as a Scrum Master or delivery lead for a software engineering team building a product rather than maintaining one.
- Experience on a team spanning multiple engineering disciplines including design, where design is on the critical path.
- Experience managing a backlog, including definition, estimation, and prioritization discipline.
- Demonstrated ability to identify and resolve dependencies on teams outside your own.
- Experience reporting delivery status to program or customer leadership against a contractual date.
- Ability to hold scope and process discipline with senior and principal engineers.
- A current agile delivery or Scrum certification.
- Bachelor's degree and 5 years of relevant experience. Additional years of directly relevant experience may substitute for the degree requirement in accordance with company labor category policy.
- Public Trust eligibility.
- United States citizenship is required.
- Work is performed on site at a government facility in the Washington, D.C. metro area. This position is not remote or hybrid.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience delivering software on a federal program against a contractual date.
- Experience coordinating delivery across several independently deployed components.
- Experience delivering into an environment with security or accreditation constraints, where the environment itself is a dependency.
- Specific certifications such as Certified ScrumMaster, Professional Scrum Master I or II, PMI-ACP, or SAFe.
- Familiarity with the backlog and delivery tracking tooling used on federal programs.