Advanced Agile Coach

Description

JOB TITLE: Advanced Agile Coach

SALARY RANGE: $128,026 - $151,112

HAY POINTS: 634

DEPT/DIV: Information Technology/ Portfolio & Program Management

SUPERVISOR: Director, Portfolio & Program Management

LOCATION: 2 Broadway, New York, NY 10004

HOURS OF WORK: 9:00 am - 5:30 pm (7.5 hours/day) or as required)

This position is eligible for telework, which is currently two days per week. New hires are eligible to apply 30 days after their effective date of hire.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is North America's largest transportation network, serving a population of 15.3 million people across a 5,000-square-mile travel area surrounding New York City, Long Island, southeastern New York State, and Connecticut. The MTA network comprises the nation's largest bus fleet and more subway and commuter rail cars than all other U.S. transit systems combined. MTA strives to provide a safe and reliable commute, excellent customer service, and rewarding opportunities.

Summary:

MTA IT-Agile COE is comprised of empowered, multi-functional individuals dedicated to guiding and enabling product teams, leadership, and stakeholders to adopt and sustain Agile practices, from strategy to delivery. Agile Coaches focus on fostering a culture of continuous improvement, collaboration, and adaptability, ensuring teams can deliver high-value solutions effectively and securely.

Agile Coaches are also responsible for teaching teams how to align with organizational goals and priorities by providing hands-on support for Agile transformation efforts, facilitating workshops. This job family is pivotal in creating an environment where Agile principles drive innovation, resilience, and value delivery across the organization.

MTA IT Agile Center of Excellence (COE) is seeking an experienced and pragmatic Agile Coach to support Agile adoption and delivery excellence across its Agile product teams. This is a hands-on coaching role focused on guiding Agile teams, Scrum Masters, Product Owners, and delivery partners through the practical implementation of Agile principles, frameworks, and technical practices in a complex, multi-team environment.

The ideal candidate brings deep expertise in Agile delivery at scale - across frameworks such as Scrum, Kanban, and SAFe; and knows how to coach teams operating within large, regulated, and multi-stakeholder organizations.

This role is central to helping teams build strong Agile foundations, improve collaboration, enhance flow, and deliver business value consistently.

As an embedded coach, you will work directly with cross-functional teams to strengthen Agile practices, facilitate workshops & ceremonies, support backlog refinement & planning, and foster a culture of continuous improvement. You will also help delivery teams improve their technical agility by promoting engineering best practices such as DevOps, CI/CD, test automation, and iterative development.

This role requires strong facilitation, mentoring, and communication skills. You should have a deep appreciation for the nuances of team dynamics, delivery challenges, and organizational context. The successful candidate will have a track record of working across multiple teams, understanding dependencies and constraints, and helping teams mature incrementally within the guardrails of Agile-at-scale models.

Responsibilities:

• Provide direct coaching and hands-on support to Agile delivery teams, including Scrum Masters, Product Owners, developers, testers, and business analysts.
• Guide teams in the effective use of Agile frameworks such as Scrum, Kanban, and Agile at scale practices appropriate to their context.
• Help product teams identify and remove impediments, improve team dynamics, and establish healthy Agile rhythms (e.g., sprint planning, daily stand-ups, reviews, and retrospectives).
• Assess team Agile maturity levels using defined metrics and qualitative feedback; co-create improvement plans tailored to each team's needs.
• Promote self-organizing teams and facilitate the development of Agile mindsets through observation, feedback, and continuous learning cycles.
• Help teams adopt Agile engineering practices, including test automation, continuous integration, trunk-based development, and DevOps practices.
• Design and deliver training sessions, basecamps, and workshops to upskill team members on Agile principles, roles, and practices.
• Facilitate Agile ceremonies and team workshops as needed, such as value stream mapping, story mapping, team charters, and working agreements.
• Coach delivery teams on managing dependencies, risks, and shared backlogs across workstreams or programs.
• Help teams and release trains improve visibility, flow, and predictability using Agile metrics such as velocity, throughput, WIP, and cycle time.
• Introduce and refine meaningful Agile metrics to drive transparency, inspect-and-adapt cycles, and performance improvement.
• Collaborate with product teams to identify opportunities for continuous improvement through retrospectives and feedback loops.
• Use data to help teams experiment, iterate, and measure the impact of process changes and delivery improvements.
• Act as a trusted partner to Product Owners and delivery managers in improving backlog health, prioritization, and stakeholder engagement.
• Engage with non-technical business partners to educate and align expectations with Agile delivery processes.
• Provide feedback and insights to leadership and transformation leads on systemic issues, coaching needs, and adoption progress.
• Guide teams in the effective use of Agile tools such as Jira and Confluence, ensuring consistent workflows and reporting.
• Support the configuration and usage of boards, dashboards, and reports to enhance team transparency and delivery tracking.
• Foster a culture of collaboration, trust, psychological safety, and accountability within and across teams.
• Act as a role model for Agile values and behaviors, promoting mindset shifts necessary for sustained Agile adoption.
• Provide practical hands-on mentoring to existing COE Coaches, Product Owners, and team members of new and existing Agile teams.
• Evolve and maintain the Agile Maturity Assessment model, assess team performance and Agile maturity, and report findings.
• Lead and participate in Agile communities of practice. Prepare and/or update organization-wide Agile artifacts and methodology documentation.
• Help iterate on and provide recommendations to advance the Agile Transformation Roadmap.
• Ensure Agile metrics are being tracked and monitored for indications of potential problem areas and assist teams in identifying and implementing solutions to address the problems.
• Oversee the coaching and planning of multiple high-performing Agile development teams across the MTA.
• Performs other duties and tasks as assigned.
• Observing the work performed by the contractor
• Reviews invoices and approves them if the work meets contractual standards
• Addressing performance issues with the contractor when possible
• Escalating issues to other parties as needed.

Qualifications:

REQUIRED:

Education and Experience:

• Education: Bachelor's degree and a minimum of 8 years of relevant experience. An equivalent combination of education and experience may be considered in lieu of a degree.

PREFERRED:

• Master's degree in the related field, Agile coaching, and a minimum of 3 years leading agile transformations.
• Certification(s): Requires at least one certification in the current platform/domain/technical skill. Possible certifications could be, but are not limited to:

Relevant Certifications

Certified Product Manager

PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)

Certified Agile Project Manager (IAPM)

ICAgile Certified Professional - Agile Project Management (ICP-APM)

SAFe 5 Agilist (SA)

SAFe Product Owner/Product Manager

Project Management Professional (PMP)

Certified Change Management Professional (CCMP)

Business Relationship Management Professional (BRMP)

Certified Business Analysis Professional (CBAP)

Technical Skills:

• Familiar with DevSecOps tools and techniques such as modern IDE's, GitHub, containerization, everything as code, and zero-trust.
• Ability to demonstrate superior organizational skills with an acute attention to detail.
• Ability to work effectively under pressure in time-sensitive situations and prioritize multiple projects with similar deadlines.
• Agile Coaching and Transformation experience.
• Minimum of 8 years of practical Agile experience.
• Strong understanding of Agile concepts, including Scrum, Kanban, Product Ownership, and Agile Scaling.
• Experience as a hands-on organizational change agent working across multiple teams
• Experience with assisting leadership and team members with removing barriers and embracing transformation by assisting each division to the standardized approach, and solutions to becoming Agile.
• Experience with building a Continuous Delivery Pipeline with DevOps culture, empowering a Lean Portfolio, and clearly understanding what it takes to successfully implement Agile frameworks in the enterprise (starting with teams' / Program levels and scaling up to Large Solutions and Portfolio levels).
• Expert understanding of technical concepts.
• Expert in process-focused execution, having successfully driven technical programs for enterprise products in a fast-paced environment.
• Expert ability to collaborate and coordinate with enterprise customers and/or business unit users.
• Expert knowledge of business analysis and project management concepts and tools.
• Expert knowledge of product lifecycle management concepts.
• Expert knowledge of IT service development concepts.
• Knowledge of Jira and Confluence
• In-depth knowledge of current and emerging technologies at a strategic level.
• Certifications including or equivalent to Scaled Agile Framework - SPC - Scrum Alliance - CST - ICAgile - Equivalent Expert / Senior Coaching Certifications.

Behavioral Skills:

• Demonstrated ability to support teams, provide coaching, and provide direct feedback.
• Expert in active listening, attention to detail, customer service, prioritization, and problem-solving skills.
• Expert in working independently and strategically.
• Expert in identifying and analyzing risks and developing effective mitigation strategies.
• Expert technical knowledge and diverse skillset to understand various technologies, systems, and potential risks.
• Expert in critical thinking, problem-solving, and decision-making skills.
• Expert in interpersonal and verbal, and written communication skills, with the ability to effectively collaborate with both technical and non-technical peers.
• Expert in managing multiple projects simultaneously and prioritizing tasks based on urgency and impact.
• Extensive hands-on experience with related tools.
• Expert experience with working under pressure and meeting deadlines individually and collaboratively. Thinks logically, assesses problems, and is results oriented.
• Expert in identifying complex business and technology risks and associated vulnerabilities.
• Expert in communicating effectively, both orally and in writing, to interact with team members, customers, management, and support personnel (technical and non-technical).
• Expert in establishing and maintaining effective working relationships with employees at all levels within the organization, and with both internal and external customers.

Competencies:

Core Competency

Proficiency Level

Competency Definition

Collaborates

Advanced

Building partnerships and working collaboratively with others to meet shared objectives

Cultivates Innovation

Adept

Creating new and better ways for the organization to be successful

Customer Focus

Adept

Building strong customer relationships and delivering customer-centric solutions

Communicates Effectively

Expert

Developing and delivering multi-mode communications that convey a clear understanding of the unique needs of different audiences

Technical Skills

Advanced

Specialized knowledge and expertise on tools, programs, domains, platforms, and products used for specific tasks

Values Diversity

Advanced

Recognizing the value that different perspectives and cultures bring to an organization

OTHER INFORMATION:

Pursuant to the New York State Public Officers Law & the MTA Code of Ethics, all employees who hold a policymaking position must file an Annual Statement of Financial Disclosure (FDS) with the NYS Commission on Ethics and Lobbying in Government (the "Commission").

Equal Employment Opportunity

MTA and its subsidiary and affiliated agencies are Equal Opportunity Employers, including with respect to veteran status and individuals with disabilities.

The MTA encourages qualified applicants from diverse backgrounds, experiences, and abilities, including military service members, to apply.