Remote, must be able to work PST hours
Daily Work Schedule Expectations : 9am-2pm PST
Manager's Update:
This is not a traditional end-to-end Technical Program Manager role and the candidate will not own the overall delivery timeline across an entire cross-functional program.
Role Focus: Approximately 80% Scrum/Agile + 20% Technical Project Management
Core Responsibilities
- Act as Scrum Master / Team Steward for three engineering teams.
- Lead and facilitate Scrum ceremonies across multiple teams running two-week sprints.
- Manage Scrum cadence and ensure ceremonies are conducted consistently and effectively.
- Facilitate planning, stand-ups, retrospectives, reviews and other Agile ceremonies.
- Help teams with prioritization and facilitate the flow of work.
- Maintain visibility into team-level timelines, dependencies and project status.
- Track approximately 3–4 projects of varying sizes across the three teams at any given time.
- Provide continuous reporting on team health, performance and delivery.
- Use JIRA extensively for task management, reporting and software-development metrics.
- Work with Confluence for documentation.
- Participate in program meetings and provide status updates for the projects being executed by the assigned teams.
- Maintain a high-fidelity understanding of the major technical projects being executed by each team.
- Understand and operate within a structured Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC).
- Coordinate effectively across engineering teams where initiatives have cross-team dependencies.
Engineering Environment
The individual will support three engineering teams:
- Data Engineering Team
- Largest team
- Approximately 8 individual contributors + manager
- Data engineering is a major component of the work.
- AI / Machine Learning Team
- Works on neural networks and related AI/ML initiatives.
- Additional Engineering Team
- Smaller team of approximately 3–4 people.
The candidate does not need to be an AI/ML or Data Engineering SME, but exposure to these areas is a strong advantage.
Must-Have / High-Priority Experience
1. Strong hands-on Scrum experience – MUST HAVE
- Proven experience serving as a Scrum Master, Agile Delivery Lead, Agile Project Manager or similar.
- Has personally led Scrum ceremonies, rather than simply working in a Scrum environment.
- Experience supporting multiple engineering/software development teams.
- Comfortable working with two-week sprint cadences.
- Experience facilitating ceremonies and helping teams maintain delivery discipline.
2. Strong JIRA proficiency – VERY IMPORTANT
- Gerald specifically emphasized a high level of JIRA proficiency.
- Candidate should be extremely comfortable using JIRA as a software-development task management and reporting platform.
- Experience with JIRA reporting, dashboards, sprint tracking, metrics and team health/performance is highly valuable.
3. Technical/Software Development Environment
- Good understanding of SDLC.
- Experience working directly with software engineering teams.
- Ability to understand technical projects at the team level without necessarily being the technical SME.
- Experience with engineering project status, dependencies and delivery tracking.
4. Technical Project Management
- Must understand project timelines and status for their assigned engineering teams.
- Should be able to communicate project status in program meetings.
- The candidate will own the timeline/status for their team's component, not the entire cross-team program.
Strong Nice-to-Haves
Data Engineering
- Previous experience working with data engineering teams or data engineering projects is highly desirable.
AI / ML
- Exposure to AI, machine learning, neural networks or LLM-related engineering projects is a strong advantage.
Atlassian
- JIRA is highly important.
- Confluence experience is preferred.
- Broader Atlassian Suite experience is a plus.
AI Automation / Development
- Interest or experience in using AI to build automations, skills or workflows is a plus.
- Exposure to tools such as Cloud Code / CodePilot or similar AI-assisted development/automation environments is beneficial.
- Experience building AI-powered automations is a differentiator, but not a core requirement.
Ideal Experience Level
Gerald specifically indicated that the sweet spot is approximately 5–8 years of experience because of the complexity of the environment.
3–5 years could work for a more traditional software-development environment, but for this particular role Gerald feels 5–8 years is the ideal range.
Candidates with 15+ years are not automatically rejected, but they need to genuinely be comfortable with the scope and understand that this role has limited ownership compared with senior/principal-level Technical Program Management positions.
Important Red Flags
Avoid candidates who are:
- Primarily Senior/Staff/Principal Technical Program Managers accustomed to owning large programs end-to-end.
- Used to having significant strategic/program-level ownership and decision-making authority.
- Expecting to own an initiative from inception through final delivery.
- Primarily Product Managers rather than Scrum/Agile practitioners.
- Primarily Agile Transformation Consultants or Enterprise Agile Coaches.
- Highly focused on Agile transformation, organizational change or coaching rather than hands-on Scrum execution.
- Candidates who may become frustrated by a structured, process-heavy pharmaceutical environment.
- Candidates whose Scrum experience is only theoretical or certification-based without actually leading ceremonies.
- Candidates with no meaningful JIRA experience.
Agile Coaching Clarification
Gerald specifically stated that deep Agile transformation/coaching experience is NOT required.
The organization currently uses Scrum primarily as a framework and is still developing its broader Agile mindset. Therefore, a candidate who is heavily focused on Agile transformation may not be the best match.
The priority is:
Hands-on Scrum execution > Agile transformation/coaching
Technical PM vs. Scrum Master Split
Gerald estimated the role at approximately:
80% – Scrum Master / Agile responsibilities
20% – Technical Project Management
The Technical PM component is primarily focused on:
- Understanding team-level project timelines
- Tracking team deliverables
- Understanding project status
- Communicating status
- Managing team-level dependencies
- Understanding what each engineering team is executing
The candidate is NOT responsible for the overall program timeline when multiple teams/repos are involved.
Top 3 – 5 Skills Needed for each role
- Experience leading agile/scrum ceremonies for multiple teams
- Proficiency to expert level experience in Atlassian tools for task management (Jira, Confluence)
- Prior experience and familiarity working with data engineering and AI/ML engineering teams in software development/delivery.
- Technical project management experience on mid to large scale software projects.
- (nice to have) Hands on experience with AI tools such as Claude code and Copilot.
Agile Specialist
As the Agile Specialist, you will report to the Senior Manager, Agile Practices as well as continuously collaborate with key stakeholders across the business to solve the most important technical problems.
You Will:
- Lead and refine continuous planning, ensuring ongoing planning for and visibility to a rolling quarter + plan for the team/s you support.
- Maintain engineering team schedules, ensuring proper resource planning and translation of estimates to key milestone dates.
- Track project milestones, dependencies, deliverables, and timelines to ensure projects and programs stay on track and meet delivery timelines.
- Remove obstacles that may hinder the team's progress.
- Coordinate communication between different teams, departments, and stakeholders.
- Collaborate with Engineering, Product, and PMO to manage and prioritize the product backlog.
- Ensure engineers have necessary product requirements and UX designs to stay on track and meet deadlines.
- Serve as the key liaison between software development teams and external stakeholders building advocacy and credibility.
- Facilitate Agile ceremonies such as daily stand-ups, sprint planning, backlog maintenance and refinement, sprint reviews, and retrospectives.
- Promote Agile best practices and educate team members to enhance team performance and productivity.
- Support the JIRA management for teams they support and other tools as appropriate.
- Provide burndown charts, velocity tracking, and other agile performance metrics to inform and resolve issues with the team and manager(s).
Required Experience & Skills:
- Bachelor's degree in Business, Information Technology, or related field.
- 5+ years’ experience in an Agile environment with experience using Agile methodologies such as Scrum or Kanban.
- Excellent organizational, communication, and interpersonal skills.
- Ability to work collaboratively with cross-functional teams.
- Strong problem-solving skills and adaptability.
- Proficiency in JIRA, Confluence, and related tooling.