Scrum Lead

Available Locations: Austin Texas
About the department
Cloudflare's IT/Enterprise Engineering, Planning and Governance Team is a crucial pillar of the CIO Organization. It manages programs and initiatives across IT Infrastructure, Enterprise Systems, and Enterprise Engineering, enabling Cloudflare internal teams to operate at their most efficient level. The team establishes end-to-end governance principles and frameworks, leads business partnering, and drives program planning, execution, and demand capacity management.
What you'll do
We are looking for a highly skilled, proactive Scrum Leadwith excellent communication and facilitation skills to join our IT PMO. Your primary mission will be to lead the Hire to Retire value stream, ensuring the seamless delivery of technical solutions that power our employee lifecycle. Your main role will be driving the team's delivery engine, partnering closely with Engineering Managers and Product Managers to remove blockers, optimize flow, and ensure high-quality, transformational outcomes.
You bring a passion for Agile principles and excel at shifting between the tactical and the strategic, understanding how sprint-level details inform the broader program and product roadmap. You are an expert at adapting the Scrum framework to the unique needs of a complex IT environment, persistently driving improvements in team dynamics and agile metrics.
The ideal candidate is a master facilitator and influencer who is comfortable playing multiple roles: coach, negotiator, diplomat, and data-driven reporter. Combined with a technical background, you have the ability to build deep trust and strong partnerships with counterparts in Engineering, Business and Operations teams.
Responsibilities:

• Lead all aspects of the Agile lifecycle for the Hire to Retire value stream. Orchestrate the planning and execution of sprints to ensure the team meets committed milestones for Cloudflare's internal ecosystem.
• Facilitate high-impact Daily Standups, Sprint Planning, Refinement, Demos, and Retrospectives. Continuously adapt these ceremonies to fit the team's evolving needs, ensuring they remain a catalyst for progress, not just a ritual.
• Maintain clear, transparent communication channels. Translate technical sprint progress, sprint themes and goals, and risks into polished updates for stakeholders visibility, ensuring leadership understands the value stream's health and roadblocks.
• Act as the glue between Engineering Managers and Product Managers. Build bridges with stakeholders to ensure clear communication, visibility and transparency.
• Manage the delivery performance and synergy of a cross-functional team comprising both FTEs and external contractors, ensuring all members are aligned toward a shared Definition of Done.
• Establish and monitor advanced Agile metrics (Lead Time, Cycle Time, Throughput). Use this data to diagnose bottlenecks and implement structural changes that improve team dynamics and delivery predictability.
• Partner with PMs to refine the backlog, ensuring business requirements are translated into actionable technical stories that incorporate sound architecture and design principles.
• Apply learnings from the H2R value stream to the broader IT organization. Actively contribute to the PMO and ACE's methodologies and mentor others to level up Agile maturity across Cloudflare.

Skills, knowledge and experience

• 5+ year experience as Scrum Master or IT Program Manager, with a focus on team-level execution and process optimization.
• Proven experience leading Agile teams through the full lifecycle of complex IT projects, preferentially within the Hire to Retire or HR Technology domain.
• Track record of improving team performance through Agile metrics (Cycle Time, Throughput, Sprint Velocity).
• A strong capability to establish trust and facilitate decision-making with Engineering Managers and Product Managers, even without direct hierarchical authority.
• Proven ability to maintain team focus and high-velocity delivery in a fast-paced, high-pressure environment with shifting business requirements.
• Advanced proficiency in Jira and Confluence, with the ability to customize workflows and dashboards. Deep knowledge of Scrum, Kanban and SAFe.
• Thrive in a hyper-growth environment, with the capacity to learn new HR technologies quickly and turn ambiguity into actionable sprint backlogs.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems Management, Technology management, Business management or comparable work experience.

Bonus Points

• Familiarity with the technical landscape of HR platforms (e.g., Workday, ADP) and an understanding of how these integrate with boundary systems.
• A strong engineering or technical background, enabling you to facilitate deep-dive discussions on integrations, data schemas, and technical debt with Engineering Managers.
• CSM (Certified Scrum Master), PSM II/III or other Agile certifications
• Proven experience coaching other Scrum Leads to improve Agile maturity across an organization.