Manager – Scrum Master / Team Coach

Job description

Prudential’s purpose is to be partners for every life and protectors for every future. Our purpose encourages everything we do by creating a culture in which diversity is celebrated and inclusion assured, for our people, customers, and partners. We provide a platform for our people to do their best work and make an impact to the business, and we support our people’s career ambitions. We pledge to make Prudential a place where you can Connect, Grow, and Succeed. Job Responsibilities: Accountable for the effectiveness of one or two squads within an ART, facilitating team events, removing impediments and coaching the squad, its Product Owner and its in-squad facilitator. Reporting to the Release Train Engineer for both delivery and people management, it protects the squad's focus and flow and drives continuous improvement Facilitate team-level events — Iteration Planning, Backlog Refinement, Iteration Review, Retrospective and Team Sync. Where covering two squads, run the Team Sync in the Tier A squad and attend the second squad's at least twice weekly. Remove impediments — the primary measure of the role. Track and act on them daily; escalate anything not resolvable within the squad to the RTE within 48 hours. Coach and develop people — move the squad towards self-management, coach the Product Owner in backlog ordering, story writing and acceptance, and select, train and develop the in-squad facilitator (a formal appraisal objective, not discretionary). Own the squad's flow and the honesty of its board — WIP limits, flow metrics and aging work items. Protect the squad — from unplanned work injected outside the agreed process and from stakeholders bypassing the Product Owner; ensure vendor engineers participate as full members with the same events, information and voice. Drive ART-level participation — prepare the squad for PI Planning (objectives, capacity, dependencies, risks, confidence vote), support System Demo readiness, and ensure the increment is genuinely integrated rather than demonstrated in isolation. Uphold quality and continuous improvement — facilitate the Definition of Done and built-in quality practices and challenge shortcuts under schedule pressure; run retrospectives that yield a few real, owned improvements and follow them through; represent the squad at weekly Coach Sync, contribute to the cross-ART Scrum Master Community of Practice, and use the quarterly Chapter Lead skip-level for issues that cannot be resolved with the RTE. Job Requirements: Minimum 4+ years in software delivery in a developer, tester, business analyst, team lead or project coordinator capacity; 1+ years as a Scrum Master preferred. Preferred certifications: SAFe Scrum Master (SSM) or Advanced Scrum Master (SASM); Professional Scrum Master I or II (PSM); Certified ScrumMaster (CSM); Kanban Management Professional (KMP); ICAgile ICP-ATF (Agile Team Facilitation). Experience with distributed and multi-vendor teams preferred, including the language skills to work effectively with offshore members where relevant. Frameworks: the 2020 Scrum Guide and Essential SAFe 6.0 team-level practice. Flow management: Kanban, work-in-process limits and flow metrics — fluency in both Scrum and Kanban, as either may be the squad's chosen method. Facilitation: facilitation techniques, a range of retrospective formats, and conflict handling within a team. Technical literacy: enough understanding of the squad's technical environment to recognise a dependency and challenge an estimate — not to design the solution. Domain: insurance fundamentals relevant to the assigned journey. Behavioural profile: influence without authority, comfortable with not being the decision maker, and a genuine interest in developing others. Prudential is an equal opportunity employer. We provide equality of opportunity of benefits for all who apply and who perform work for our organisation irrespective of sex, race, age, ethnic origin, educational, social and cultural background, marital status, pregnancy and maternity, religion or belief, disability or part-time / fixed-term work, or any other status protected by applicable law. We encourage the same standards from our recruitment and third-party suppliers taking into account the context of grade, job and location. We also allow for reasonable adjustments to support people with individual physical or mental health requirements.