Scrum Master

Job Title

Senior Scrum Master

Location

Hybrid - Cape town

Employment Type

Contract

Role Purpose

We are seeking an experienced Senior Scrum Master to enable predictable, high-quality delivery across multiple interconnected Customer Value Management (CVM) squads and customer journeys. This role acts as both a servant leader to Agile delivery teams and a key delivery coordinator across Product Owners, channel teams, operational functions, and senior stakeholders.

The successful candidate will apply Agile principles pragmatically while providing the planning, dependency management, governance, and release coordination required within a complex telecommunications environment.

Role Overview

The Senior Scrum Master will:

• Support two interdependent Agile squads, including a fully cross-functional squad and a squad dependent on shared resources.
• Coordinate delivery across multiple customer journeys, Product Owners, and technical teams.
• Manage complex delivery dependencies across backend systems, digital channels, QA, applications, and operational teams.
• Own delivery coordination from initial planning through development, testing, governance approvals, production deployment, and post-release validation.
• Drive transparency, accountability, and sustainable delivery practices while ensuring alignment to business objectives and strategic timelines.

Key Responsibilities

Agile Delivery & Team Enablement

• Facilitate and continuously improve Agile and Scrum practices across assigned delivery squads.
• Lead Agile ceremonies including Sprint Planning, Daily Stand-ups, Backlog Refinement, Sprint Reviews, and Retrospectives.
• Coach teams to become increasingly self-organising, accountable, and focused on delivering business value.
• Identify, manage, and remove delivery impediments and blockers.
• Shield teams from unnecessary distractions and conflicting priorities.
• Foster a culture of collaboration, transparency, trust, and continuous improvement.
• Monitor team capacity and shared resource constraints, proactively escalating risks where required.
• Support Agile maturity and best practice adoption across teams and stakeholders.

Delivery Planning & Dependency Management

• Develop and maintain integrated delivery plans spanning analysis, design, development, testing, governance, release readiness, and production deployment.
• Manage cross-team dependencies and ensure alignment of delivery activities across multiple workstreams.
• Coordinate delivery schedules and milestone commitments across Product, Technology, QA, Operations, and Channel teams.
• Track and communicate delivery progress against timelines and business objectives.
• Facilitate dependency mapping sessions and risk identification workshops.
• Ensure readiness checkpoints are completed before key release milestones.
• Escalate delivery risks, resource constraints, and dependency issues in a timely manner.

Stakeholder & Governance Management

• Act as the primary delivery coordination point between squads and business stakeholders.
• Provide clear and concise delivery reporting to senior leadership and programme stakeholders.
• Facilitate governance forums, planning sessions, and stakeholder reviews.
• Ensure agreed delivery commitments, milestones, and release dates are understood and tracked.
• Build strong working relationships across Product, Technology, Operations, and Commercial functions.

Release & Production Management

• Coordinate production release activities across multiple teams.
• Ensure all development, testing, operational readiness, and governance requirements are completed ahead of deployment.
• Manage release schedules and support go-live execution activities.
• Coordinate post-implementation reviews and validation activities.
• Drive continuous improvement through lessons learned and retrospective feedback.

Risk, Issue & Dependency Management

• Maintain visibility of all delivery risks, assumptions, issues, and dependencies.
• Proactively identify potential impacts to delivery timelines and customer outcomes.
• Facilitate mitigation planning and issue resolution activities.
• Ensure transparent communication of risks and status across stakeholders.

Required Skills & Experience

Essential

• Extensive experience as a Scrum Master within Agile software delivery environments.
• Proven experience supporting multiple Agile squads simultaneously.
• Strong understanding of Scrum, Kanban, Agile Delivery, and Lean principles.
• Demonstrable experience managing complex dependencies across multiple teams and workstreams.
• Experience within large-scale telecommunications, technology, digital, or enterprise transformation programmes.
• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills.
• Experience facilitating senior-level governance and delivery reporting.
• Ability to balance Agile methodologies with structured delivery planning requirements.
• Strong risk, issue, and dependency management capability.
• Experience coordinating production releases and deployment activities.

Desirable

• Telecommunications industry experience.
• SAFe, Scrum Master, Agile Coach, or equivalent certification.
• Experience with Jira, Confluence, Azure DevOps, or similar Agile tooling.
• Understanding of customer journey delivery and Customer Value Management (CVM) initiatives.
• Experience managing shared-resource delivery models.