Job Title:Senior Scrum Master / Jira Governance Lead
Job Type: Permanent
Location: Bangalore
Job Description:
Role Summary-
We are seeking a senior, highly structured Scrum Master and Jira Governance Lead to own Agile delivery governance across multiple teams. This role goes beyond facilitating ceremonies: it establishes standards, drives adoption, challenges non-compliance, and uses Jira data to improve accountability, delivery predictability, and decision-making.
The successful candidate will confidently lead teams through planning and execution, maintain high-quality Jira records, surface risks before they affect commitments, and communicate clear, outcome-focused insights to engineering, product, business, and senior leadership stakeholders.
Key Responsibilities:
1. Jira Governance and Process Compliance
Own and enforce Jira governance standards across teams, boards, projects, and delivery workflows.
Establish consistent work-item hierarchy and decomposition, including Initiative, Epic, Story, Task, and Sub-task.
Define and enforce entry and exit criteria, mandatory fields, acceptance criteria, story points, due dates, ownership, status updates, and Definition of Done.
Ensure Jira remains a current, accurate, and auditable system of record—not a retrospective status-reporting tool.
Conduct recurring board-health reviews and targeted audits; identify gaps, assign remediation actions, and follow through to closure.
Challenge exceptions and non-compliance constructively, escalating repeated or material gaps when required.
Partner with Jira administrators and delivery leaders to standardize workflows, permissions, fields, automation rules, dashboards, and reporting conventions.
2. Agile Ceremonies and Delivery Leadership
Lead Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Backlog Refinement, Sprint Review, Retrospective, release planning, and cross-team coordination with clear outcomes and documented actions.
Protect sprint integrity by challenging unplanned work, incomplete requirements, weak estimation, unclear ownership, and over-commitment.
Drive timely resolution of blockers, dependencies, risks, and decisions; maintain clear owners and escalation paths.
Coach Product Owners, engineering leads, and delivery teams on practical Agile behaviors while holding teams accountable to agreed standards.
Promote continuous improvement without allowing flexibility to become process inconsistency.
3. Metrics, Forecasting, and Executive Visibility
Own delivery-health metrics such as sprint commitment versus completion, velocity trends, throughput, cycle time, blocker age, backlog age, estimation coverage, and work-item hygiene.
Build and maintain Jira dashboards and JQL-based reporting that highlight delivery status, dependencies, exceptions, trends, and emerging risk.
Use historic delivery data, capacity, scope movement, and dependency signals to forecast outcomes and provide realistic delivery projections.
Translate Jira data into concise, decision-ready communication for senior stakeholders, distinguishing completed work, work underway, upcoming commitments, risks, and required decisions.
Identify data-quality limitations and prevent unsupported conclusions or misleading forecasts.
4. AI-Enabled Delivery Operations
Use approved AI tools such as Microsoft Copilot, Claude, ChatGPT, or equivalent platforms to accelerate planning, summarization, reporting, risk identification, and trend analysis.
Apply AI responsibly, validating outputs and protecting confidential, proprietary, and personal information in accordance with organizational policy.
Identify opportunities to automate repetitive governance checks, follow-ups, reporting, and workflow administration.
Help teams adopt practical AI-enabled ways of working that improve quality and speed without weakening accountability.
5. Communication and Stakeholder Influence
Communicate confidently and clearly with engineering, product, business, program, and leadership stakeholders.
Influence without direct authority and create alignment on process expectations, priorities, risks, and corrective actions.
Facilitate difficult conversations objectively, using evidence and agreed standards rather than opinion.
Provide concise updates focused on outcomes, variance, risk, ownership, and next actions.
Required Qualifications:
10+ years of experience in Scrum Master, Agile delivery, program delivery, PMO, or delivery-operations roles, including responsibility for multiple teams or complex initiatives.
Deep hands-on Jira expertise, including workflow design, board configuration, issue hierarchy, filters, advanced JQL, dashboards, automation, permissions, and reporting.
Demonstrated experience establishing and enforcing Jira governance, delivery controls, and consistent ways of working.
Strong command of Scrum, Kanban, backlog management, estimation, dependency management, capacity planning, and release coordination.
Proven analytical ability to interpret delivery data, forecast outcomes, identify risk, and recommend corrective action.
Executive-level written and verbal communication skills, with the judgment to tailor detail to the audience.
Demonstrated ability to lead through influence, resolve ambiguity, and drive sustained behavioral change.
Preferred Qualifications:
CSM, PSM, PMI-ACP, SAFe, PMP, or comparable Agile/delivery certification.
Experience integrating Jira with Confluence, GitHub/GitLab, Azure DevOps, CI/CD platforms, Power BI, or related delivery tools.
Experience designing governance scorecards, portfolio reporting, and cross-team operating cadences.
Practical experience using enterprise-approved AI tools in delivery or operational workflows.
Technical background sufficient to engage credibly with engineering and platform teams.
Measures of Success:
Jira records are complete, current, consistently structured, and trusted for decision-making.
Governance exceptions are visible, owned, and resolved within agreed timeframes.
Sprint and release outcomes become more predictable, with risks surfaced earlier.
Ceremonies produce decisions, commitments, and action—not merely meetings.
Leadership receives concise, evidence-based forecasts and delivery-health insights.
Teams demonstrate sustained process discipline and continuous improvement.