Discover. A more rewarding way to work.

At Discover Financial Services, you’ll find yourself in the company of some of the industry’s smartest and most reliable professionals. And at a company that rewards dedication, values innovation and supports growth.

Thrive in an environment that promotes teamwork and shared success. Build on a foundation of mutual respect. Join the company that understands rewarding careers like no other, with this exceptional opportunity:

Job Description:

The Collections Value Stream is currently seeking a Scrum Master to join our team. The agile teams deliver technology solutions which support Card Member Assistance (CMA) organization. In this role, the Scrum Master will work directly with technical developers, testers, product owners, product managers, and other technology areas to ensure rapid product delivery.

The Scrum Master (SM) is a servant leader enabling their team to work as effectively as possible. Removes bottlenecks and issues that slow down the teams progress. Coaches the team to own and continuously improve their process and practices. Facilitates mandatory scrum team meetings and ensures scrum practices are adhered to by the team.

Qualities and Behaviors:

• Understands and upholds the scrum framework, protects the team from distractions, and strives for early acceptance. Advocate of the agile framework
• Effectively facilitate required meetings (daily stand up/huddle, release/sprint planning, sprint demo/retrospective). Knows how to incorporate offshore and remote team members
• Proactively manage dependencies and remove impediments. Locate and prevent dependencies for the team before they may see them. Know when to escalate dependencies to management. Protects the team from distractions like non-sprint work and changing business requirements
• Demonstrates servant leadership skills
• Displays self-awareness, collaboration and empathy. Motivate, encourage, influence and empower others. Establishes strong, clear communication. Ability to give and receive feedback
• Uses the appropriate features in Rally/Jira (Burnup/Burndown chart, cumulative flow diagram, enhanced velocity chart, Release/Sprint planning, capacity planning)

Responsibilities include:

• Drives the team to high performing levels by creating a healthy Agile environment, provides Agile coaching to team (test first, XP, etc)
• Schedules and facilitates all relevant meetings for the release, including sprint pipeline grooming, release planning, sprint planning and daily stand ups/huddles
• Protects the team, facilitates the removal of issues/blockers/impediments, and helps the team resolve dependencies
• Responsible for facilitating the sprint pipeline grooming that gets the User Story to Ready state
• Manages the release and sprint timelines, follows up on key action items
• Assesses the scrum team’s velocity for the upcoming sprint and tracks the sprint health
• Facilitates the sprint review and demo, sprint retrospective. Captures and distributes feedback
• Provides status updates to Product Owners, business stakeholders and management, as needed
• Completes Product Development Process (PDP) documentation
• Maintains release information in Clarity and Rally
• Ensures test environment is set up properly, with all necessary dependencies and test data
• Plans and coordinates testing environment deployments, production installs and assures they are complete
• Identify dependencies between agile teams and help communicate and resolve dependencies between different teams.
• Participate in Scrum of Scrums forum within the Agile Release Train to communicate agile team’s progress, dependencies and impediments

Skills:

Required Skills/Experience:

• Degree: Bachelors
• Experience: 3+ years
• First level Scrum Master certification (CSM, PSM I)
• Experience playing the Scrum Master role for at least one year for a software development team that was diligently applying Scrum principles, practices, and theory.
• Good skills and knowledge of servant leadership, facilitation, situational awareness, conflict resolution, continual improvement, empowerment, and increasing transparency
• Knowledge of numerous well documented patterns and techniques for filling in the intentional gaps left in the Scrum approach(example: numerous Burndown techniques, numerous Retrospective formats, handling bugs, etc)

Preferred Skills/Experience (Any of these is a plus):

• Second level Scrum Master certification (CSP, PSM II)
• Experience playing the Scrum Master role for at least two years for a software development team that was diligently applying Scrum principles, practices, and theory.
• Knowledge of other Agile approaches: XP, Kanban, Crystal, FDD, etc – Knowledge and/or experience with widely

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and do not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, color, sex, age, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, status as a veteran, and basis of disability or any other federal, state or local protected class.