Senior Agile Delivery Coach

Senior Agile Delivery Coach-166392

Washington, DC

Duration: 12 months

The Senior Agile Delivery Coach serves as the hands-on operational and execution coach across the Fleet delivery ecosystem, partnering directly with active release trains, product teams, engineering squads, and operational stakeholders to instill sustainable agility on the ground. Operating as the delivery counterpart to strategic leadership, this practitioner translates enterprise operating model principles into disciplined execution cadences, clear backlog structures, proactive dependency tracking, and predictable value delivery. The ideal candidate blends pragmatic agile coaching with strong operational acumen to eliminate delivery friction, improve team flow, and uplift agile maturity across complex, highly regulated enterprise systems.

Key Responsibilities

• Operational & Team Delivery Coaching: Partner directly with Scrum Masters, Product Owners, and cross-functional technical teams to mature agile practices, refine team cadences, and improve delivery predictability and flow.
• Release Train & Cadence Facilitation: Facilitate key program- and team-level ceremonies—including Program Increment (PI) planning sessions, System Demos, Inspect & Adapt workshops, and cross-team synchronization forums.
• Flow Optimization & Impediment Removal: Track and analyze delivery flow across teams, proactively identifying delivery bottlenecks, process friction, and technical impediments, and driving swift resolution with team leads.
• Backlog Health & User Story Refinement: Coach Product Owners and teams on disciplined backlog management, user story decomposition, acceptance criteria definition, and realistic capacity-based forecasting in hybrid environments.
• Cross-Team Dependency Coordination: Map and monitor operational interdependencies across engineering, operations technology, infrastructure, and third-party delivery partners to protect committed delivery milestones.
• Tooling Hygiene & Performance Metrics: Drive consistent best practices across Jira Software, Confluence, and Jira Align, establishing meaningful delivery metrics (e.g., velocity, cycle time, throughput, say/do ratios) to guide continuous improvement.
• Continuous Improvement & Mentorship: Cultivate a collaborative, high-trust delivery culture through targeted retrospectives, agile health assessments, and hands-on mentoring of Scrum Masters and delivery leads.

Required Qualifications & Experience

• Agile Coaching Experience: 6+ years of hands-on agile coaching and delivery leadership experience guiding multi-team programs, Agile Release Trains (ARTs), and technical squads in complex enterprise environments.
• Technical & Delivery Background: 4+ years of prior experience working directly in IT, software development, operations technology, or enterprise systems engineering, establishing technical credibility with engineering and architecture peers.
• Pragmatic Framework Expertise: Strong, practical command of Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, and hybrid Waterfall-to-Agile frameworks, with the ability to balance framework theory with real-world operational constraints.
• Enterprise Tooling Proficiency: Advanced, hands-on proficiency with Jira Software and Confluence for sprint- and release-level tracking, along with experience using Jira Align for program-level rollups and dependency tracking.
• Certifications: Active SAFe certification (such as SAFe Practice Consultant [SPC], SAFe Release Train Engineer [RTE], or SAFe Scrum Master [SSM]) or equivalent recognized credentials (e.g., ICAgile, PSM/CSM).
• Communication & Facilitation Skills: Exceptional interpersonal, conflict-resolution, and meeting-facilitation capabilities, with a proven track record of aligning technical contributors with business and operational managers.
• Working Requirements & Travel: Ability to thrive in an active, camera-on virtual team environment, with willingness to travel periodically along the Northeast corridor for quarterly PI Planning events and key working sessions.