Scrum Master Associate Advisor - HIH - Evernorth

We are seeking an experienced Scrum Master / Technical Product Owner, with a primary focus on Scrum Master responsibilities, to drive Agile delivery, strengthen team performance, and build a culture of ownership and accountability.

This role is ideal for a leader who excels in Agile facilitation, coaching, resolving impediments, and orchestrating cross‑team communication—while also supporting key product responsibilities such as refining requirements and managing backlogs.

You will partner closely with engineering leads, onshore Product Owners, and offshore development teams to ensure predictable, high‑quality delivery across complex backend and integration initiatives.

• Lead and facilitate all Scrum ceremonies: sprint planning, daily stand‑ups, backlog refinement, sprint reviews, and retrospectives.
• Coach development and QA teams on Agile principles, team dynamics, and continuous delivery practices.
• Proactively remove blockers and ensure seamless collaboration across engineering, product, and QA.
• Track, analyze, and present Agile metrics (velocity, burndown, cycle time) to improve predictability and delivery efficiency.
• Foster a culture of transparency, continuous improvement, psychological safety, and shared ownership.
• Ensure alignment on sprint goals and maintain clarity of priorities and timelines for the team.
• Partner with leadership to identify process gaps and implement improvements across tools, workflows, and communication channels.
• Guide the team in disciplined execution—maintaining Definition of Ready, Definition of Done, quality gates, and release readiness.

• Collaborate with onshore Product Owners to refine business requirements into clear, actionable user stories.
• Maintain and groom the product backlog, ensuring clarity, prioritization, and accurate sizing.
• Write detailed acceptance criteria, validate completed work, and ensure high‑quality deliverables.
• Provide functional and technical context to engineers, particularly around backend, API, and system integration needs.
• Ensure traceability between business objectives, features, and technical implementation.
• Support release planning, dependency management, and cross‑team alignment.

• Maintain working knowledge of backend systems, APIs, and cloud services (preferably AWS) to support decision‑making and unblock teams.
• Partner with engineering leads to refine estimates, sequence work, and understand technical constraints.
• Collaborate with QA to ensure testing strategies align with sprint goals and release timelines.
• Identify risks early, communicate them clearly, and drive mitigation strategies proactively.

• 8–12 years of experience as a Scrum Master, Agile Coach, Technical Product Owner, or System Analyst.
• Demonstrated leadership of Agile teams, especially in distributed onshore/offshore environments.
• Strong facilitation, coaching, and conflict‑resolution skills with a servant‑leadership mindset.
• Experience converting business requirements into actionable user stories and acceptance criteria.
• Solid understanding of software development workflows, backend systems, APIs, and cloud environments.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to influence, motivate, and align cross‑functional teams.

• Certifications such as CSM, PSM I/II, SAFe SM, CSPO.
• Familiarity with AI tooling, LLM workflows, or emerging AI technologies (nice to have, not mandatory).
• Exposure to Python‑based systems and AWS cloud environments.
• Strong analytical and problem‑solving capabilities.