The Technical Scrum Leader facilitates agile delivery for one or more Scrum teams, combining strong Scrum facilitation skills with hands-on technical fluency to bridge Product Managers, Business Analysts, and engineering teams. This role runs effective ceremonies, maintains backlog readiness, and proactively removes technical and organizational blockers impacting delivery. The Technical Scrum Leader partners closely with engineering leads to surface technical risks, dependencies, and trade-offs in terms the broader team and stakeholders can act on, driving predictable, high-quality delivery within an agile environment.
Primary Duties & Responsibilities
- Facilitate daily standups, sprint planning, sprint review, and retrospectives for one or more Scrum teams.
- Ensure ceremonies are effective, time-boxed, and action-oriented.
- Maintain backlog readiness above target thresholds, partnering with Product Owners and Business Analysts on grooming and refinement.
- Act as a single source of priority for the team, resolving competing or unclear directives.
Technical Delivery Enablement
- Partner with engineering leads to understand technical dependencies, architecture constraints, and technical debt affecting sprint commitments.
- Translate technical risks and blockers into terms the broader team and business stakeholders can act on.
- Support technical story refinement, ensuring acceptance criteria and definition of done are clear, testable, and complete.
- Coordinate technical spikes and proof-of-concept work within sprint planning.
- Proactively identify and remove obstacles impacting team velocity and delivery commitments.
- Coordinate user acceptance testing (UAT) and cross-team dependencies.
- Escalate unresolved technical or organizational blockers to appropriate leadership.
- Represent the team in the weekly Scrum Leader SOS to surface team status and cross-team dependencies.
Metrics & Reporting
- Monitor and report team velocity, sprint burndown, and delivery predictability.
- Ensure timely capture of Tempo time and consistent cataloging of scrum artifacts in Confluence.
- Identify trends and process improvement opportunities from sprint and delivery data.
Agile Coaching & Continuous Improvement
- Coach team members and Product Owners on Agile and Scrum best practices.
- Champion continuous improvement initiatives within the team and across the broader delivery practice.
- Support onboarding of new team members to agile processes and tooling.
- Identify and pilot AI tools and practices that improve backlog grooming, reporting, and delivery efficiency.
- Share learnings and best practices with the broader Scrum Leader community.
Other
- Perform other duties as assigned.
Qualifications
- Required:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Business, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
- 3-5 years of experience as a Scrum Master, Scrum Leader, or technical delivery lead.
- Working technical knowledge of software development practices (e.g., APIs, databases, CI/CD, cloud environments) sufficient to engage credibly with engineering teams.
- Proficiency with agile tooling (e.g., Jira, Confluence, Tempo, Azure DevOps, or similar).
- Strong facilitation, communication, and conflict-resolution skills.
- Demonstrated ability to translate technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders and vice versa.
- Experience managing backlog health and sprint metrics.
- Preferred:
- Certified Scrum Master (CSM), Professional Scrum Master (PSM), or equivalent Agile certification.
- Prior hands-on experience as a developer, QA engineer, or technical analyst.
- Experience coordinating UAT and release readiness activities.
- Experience evaluating or adopting AI tools to improve backlog grooming, reporting, or delivery efficiency.