Scrum Master

Outstanding long-term contract opportunity! A well-known Financial Services Company is looking for a Scrum Master in Des Moines, IA (Hybrid).

Contract Duration: 24 Months

The Scrum Master is a leadership position responsible for guiding Agile teams to consistently deliver value while continuously improving ways of working. This role leads and facilitates Agile ceremonies, proactively identifies and mitigates delivery risks, coaches teams and product partners, and ensures alignment with enterprise Agile standards. The Scrum Master demonstrates strong leadership presence, deep understanding of the team’s work and domain, and actively drives focus, flow, and accountability to achieve predictable, high‑quality outcomes.

• Expert proficiency in Jira, creating dashboards for team performance trends.
• Experience working with Scrum and Kanban teams;
  Kanban coaching experience
• Experience managing Kanban boards

• Lead and facilitate Agile ceremonies to achieve clear outcomes and delivery commitments
• Coach teams, Product Owners, and Engineering partners on Agile practices and behaviors
• Maintain strong understanding of team backlog, priorities, and value delivered
• Protect team focus by managing scope, dependencies, and unplanned work
• Drive continuous improvement using metrics, retrospectives, and coaching plans
• Meets with Product and Engineering partners at the appropriate frequency (at a minimum monthly) to review team maturity, metrics, and operational improvement opportunities.
• Resolves team conflict within one sprint by using facilitation techniques and ensuring updated agreements are followed.
• Demonstrates leadership presence and professionalism by responding to feedback no more than 48 hours post feedback, requesting clarification when needed, and role‑modeling calm fact‑based communication during escalations.
• Assesses team maturity monthly using a monthly coaching plan with measurable progress indicators.
• Guides teams toward effective work break-down by ensuring every user story meets DoR and DoD, proactively reduces scope creep by driving alignment on sprint goals, validating acceptance criteria prior to commitment, and addressing unplanned work during Reviews and Refinements.
• Provides real-time targeted coaching to strengthen team agile practices, working habits, flow, quality, predictability, and alignment, resulting in improvements of key agile metrics and software delivery practices.
• Effectively identifies, tracks and manages cross team dependencies ensuring risks are surfaced early and resolved through proactive coordination with stakeholders and delivery partners
• Identifies and surfaces impediments within 24 hours, maintains an impediment backlog(in JIRA), and drives resolution with appropriate owners within the sprint as to prevent unnecessary delays .
• Maintains expert proficiency in JIRA by creating dashboards and automation that visualize team performance trends (cycle time, throughput, WIP, rollover).