Scrum Master / Kanban Flow Manager

Description

About the Role

The Field Solutions Architecture team designs, builds, and operates edge infrastructure platforms for enterprise retail and convenience customers. The work covers the full lifecycle: platform engineering and tooling, lab and pilot builds, production rollouts across hundreds of customer locations, and ongoing operational support. The team works directly with customers through standing project calls, escalations, and onsite engagements.

You will support two pods of Solutions Architects, each with its own pod lead. You will run the shared ceremonies, manage intake and triage, keep the board accurate, and give leadership the data it needs to make prioritization calls.

How We Work

• Kanban across both pods. Work is pulled, not committed to in sprints, because a large share of it cannot be scheduled in advance.
• A single daily standup of 30 minutes, split into two 15-minute halves, one per pod. The whole team attends so cross-pod dependencies surface naturally, and you keep each half on time and on topic.
• Regular replenishment and triage sessions to prioritize the intake queue and route work to the right pod.
• Retrospectives and flow reviews on a recurring cadence, driven by metrics rather than gut feel.
• Jira is the system of record. Every piece of work, including customer meetings and reactive support, is tracked there with required classification fields used for time accounting.

What You Will Do

• Facilitate the daily standup, replenishment meetings, triage, retrospectives, and flow reviews for both pods.
• Own intake and triage: make sure new work entering the queue is scoped, categorized, prioritized, and routed correctly, and that triage itself never becomes a bottleneck.
• Manage the Jira workspace: board hygiene, workflow states, ticket quality, epic and sub-task structure, and consistent use of required classification fields.
• Make unplanned work visible. Track the ratio of planned to reactive work and show leadership the real cost of escalations and context switching.
• Track and report flow metrics: cycle time, throughput, aging WIP, and time spent in blocked states. Use them to drive improvement conversations.
• Follow up on blocked items daily, including work blocked on customers, vendors, or other internal teams, and keep stakeholders informed when dependencies slip.
• Coordinate cross-pod dependencies so shared tooling, images, and infrastructure changes from the platform pod land when the delivery pod needs them.
• Partner with project managers and account stakeholders on customer programs (pilots, rollouts, migrations) and translate customer milestones into sequenced team work.
• Support the pod leads and the Director with capacity views, flow summaries, and early warning on at-risk work.
• Make sure retrospective action items get done, not just recorded.

What Makes This Role Different

• Customer-facing delivery. Much of the team week is built around standing customer calls, onsite engagements, and scheduled maintenance windows. Process has to flex around real customer commitments.
• Mixed work types. Planned platform engineering, customer project milestones, documentation, and reactive support all flow through the same team and the same board.
• Two pods, one process. You keep two pods with different work profiles aligned on shared standards without forcing identical practices on both.
• Technical context. The team works on Linux-based hypervisor platforms, virtualization, networking, automation, and Windows VM workloads. You do not need to do this work yourself, but you need to follow the conversation well enough to spot risk and dependencies.

Requirements

Required Qualifications

• 3+ years as a Scrum Master, Kanban flow manager, agile delivery lead, or similar role supporting technical teams. Infrastructure, platform engineering, DevOps, or professional services backgrounds preferred.
• Demonstrated experience running Kanban in environments with significant unplanned, interrupt-driven work. Feature-team Scrum experience alone is not enough.
• Strong, hands-on Jira administration skills: workflows, boards, custom fields, JQL, dashboards, and reporting.
• Experience facilitating across multiple teams or pods at the same time.
• Clear written and verbal communication. Able to summarize status for executives and translate priorities for engineers.
• Comfortable working with external customers and representing the team in customer-facing settings.
• Willingness and ability to travel within the US (up to 25%) for customer onsite engagements, pilots, and rollout support.

Preferred Qualifications

• Certification such as CSM, PSM I/II, or a Kanban certification (KMP/KSD). Real-world judgment matters more than the certificate.
• Working knowledge of IT infrastructure: virtualization (KVM or VMware), Linux, networking, or edge and retail technology environments.
• Experience in professional services, managed services, or customer deployment organizations where delivery is tied to customer milestones.
• Experience standing up process in a team that did not previously have a dedicated Scrum Master.
• Familiarity with flow metrics tooling and time-accounting or capitalization-driven work classification.