OVERVIEW
OnTrac is seeking a Scrum Master to serve as the dedicated Agile facilitator and servant leader for a Google Cloud Platform application development engagement. You own the outcome, not just the process: predictable delivery, team health, and client confidence are results you are accountable for. Working closely with the Product Owner, UX team, engineers, and architects, you will make sure the team follows Scrum practices and delivers high-quality software predictably.
This is a high-bar role for a proven practitioner. You will facilitate all Scrum ceremonies, remove impediments, coach the team on Agile methodologies, and handle team dynamics with minimal oversight, acting as a trusted advisor to client leaders while continuing to grow toward senior leadership.
The ideal candidate is organized, empathetic, analytical, client-minded, and accountable. You structure ambiguous problems, form and test hypotheses, and lead with the answer. You take full ownership, escalate early with a recommendation attached, and never wait to be asked. You deliver results, communicate with confidence, and keep raising your own standard.
ENGAGEMENT
- Expected start date: as soon as possible
- Location: United States only, fully remote
- You must be located in, and authorized to work in, the United States for the full duration of the engagement
PRIMARY DUTIES
These duties are representative rather than exhaustive.
- Scrum Ceremonies Facilitation: Facilitate Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, and Retrospectives, keeping ceremonies time-boxed, engaging, and valuable. Design each ceremony around a clear purpose and decision, measure its value, and retire or redesign any ceremony that does not earn its time.
- Agile Coaching: Coach the development team, Product Owner, and stakeholders on Agile principles, Scrum frameworks, and best practices. Baseline team and organizational Agile maturity at the start of the engagement, set improvement targets, and report progress against them.
- Impediment Removal: Proactively identify and remove blockers, surface conflicts early, and foster a culture of problem-solving. Own every impediment to closure, track time-to-resolve, and escalate within 24 hours when it cannot be resolved at team level, with options and a recommended path.
- Team Health and Velocity: Track team velocity, capacity, and overall health to drive continuous improvement and predictable delivery. Go beyond velocity by tracking flow metrics (cycle time, throughput, work in progress, and aging items) and team health indicators, and act on the trends before they become problems.
- SAFe Participation: Contribute to PI Planning, iteration planning, System Demos, and Inspect and Adapt. Help manage dependencies across teams within the Agile Release Train. Prepare teams for PI Planning with a refined, sized, and dependency-mapped backlog, and run a visible dependency plan that gives the Release Train Engineer no surprises.
- Product Owner Collaboration: Support the Product Owner in maintaining and continuously refining the backlog, ensuring stories have clear acceptance criteria and meet the Definition of Ready. Coach the Product Owner to prioritize by business value and outcome, and keep at least two sprints of ready work in the backlog at all times.
- Client Engagement: Support demos and working sessions, build trusted relationships with client stakeholders, and communicate sprint progress and Agile maturity clearly. Hold regular one-to-one touch points with client sponsors, anticipate their questions, and bring a point of view on delivery risk, pace, and trade-offs.
- Metrics and Reporting: Track sprint progress, burn-down/burn-up charts, and backlog health, and report clearly to stakeholders and the PMO. Produce a concise one-page delivery summary each sprint that leads with the headline, shows status against plan, and states the decisions required from stakeholders.
- Scope and Risk Visibility: Maintain