Purpose of the job
The Scrum Master will support the SmartDelay team to establish a consistent, transparent and effective delivery rhythm, helping the team manage competing priorities, dependencies and live client demands while maintaining focus on agreed sprint outcomes. This is a hands-on delivery role rather than a purely facilitative Scrum Master position. The role will work closely with Commercial and the SmartDelay delivery squad, including Business Analysis, Engineering and QA, to make work visible, improve planning and flow, remove blockers and ensure issues are surfaced and addressed early. The successful candidate will be calm, credible and resilient, able to challenge constructively and bring clarity and delivery discipline in a complex environment without introducing unnecessary process.
Sprint and delivery management
•Run effective sprint planning, daily stand-ups, sprint reviews and retrospectives.
•Ensure sprint goals, priorities and commitments are understood and visible.
•Track progress through the sprint and address slippage, blockers and dependencies early.
•Help the squad balance planned delivery with defects, production issues and urgent client demand.
•Reduce avoidable carry-over by ensuring incomplete work is understood, challenged and addressed rather than routinely rolling into the next sprint.
•Make changes to priorities or sprint commitments explicit, including the impact on existing work and delivery dates.
Backlog readiness and planning
•Work with Commercial, Business Analysis and the wider SmartDelay squad to ensure work entering a sprint is sufficiently understood, prioritised and ready.
•Improve backlog and sprint readiness by identifying unclear requirements, missing decisions and unresolved dependencies before work is committed.
•Support practical prioritisation where demand exceeds available capacity.
•Make trade-offs and capacity constraints visible so that changes in priority are conscious decisions.
•Ensure upcoming work is refined early enough to support effective sprint planning.
•Help Commercial and the squad understand the impact of new or urgent requests on existing commitments.
Team effectiveness
•Build a stronger and more predictable delivery rhythm across Commercial, Business Analysis, Engineering and QA.
•Facilitate difficult delivery conversations constructively where priorities, ownership or expectations are unclear.
•Challenge unhelpful delivery behaviours and ways of working without creating unnecessary conflict.
•Help establish clear ownership and follow-through on actions and decisions.
•Encourage accountability while maintaining a collaborative team environment.
•Create a working environment in which delivery issues can be raised early and dealt with openly.
•Reduce reliance on senior leadership to resolve routine delivery issues by helping the squad establish clear responsibility and effective routes to resolution.
Blockers and dependencies
•Identify blockers quickly and ensure there is a clear owner and route to resolution.
•Ensure blockers and dependencies are actively managed through to resolution rather than simply recorded.
•Escalate issues when the squad cannot resolve them within an appropriate timeframe.
•Coordinate dependencies across other Collinson teams and third parties.
•Ensure decisions and dependencies do not remain unresolved because ownership is unclear.
•Distinguish genuine blockers requiring intervention from issues that the squad can and should resolve itself.
Delivery visibility and reporting
•Maintain a clear and current view of sprint health, capacity, delivery risk and upcoming demand.
•Use Jira to provide accurate delivery visibility without creating administration for its own sake.
•Provide concise, evidence-based updates to Product & Delivery leadership.
•Identify recurring causes of delay, rework, interruption or carry-over and work with the squad to address them.
•Use appropriate delivery measures to support improvement and informed planning rather than target-driven reporting.
•Ensure committed work, emerging demand and capacity constraints are visible to Commercial and the wider squad.
•Help ensure delivery problems and risks are surfaced early, reducing late surprises for the squad and stakeholders.
Continuous improvement
•Use retrospectives and delivery evidence to identify practical improvements to flow and squad effectiveness.
•Help the squad establish sustainable and repeatable ways of working.
•Apply Scrum and Agile practices pragmatically, adapting them where necessary to improve delivery outcomes.
•Focus improvement activity on practical delivery problems rather than process for its own sake.
•Leave the squad with stronger delivery disciplines and less reliance on day-to-day intervention.
Requirements
•Strong practical knowledge of Scrum and Agile delivery, applied pragmatically rather than rigidly.
•Excellent facilitation skills, including the confidence to handle disagreement, ambiguity and competing priorities.
•Calm and resilient under pressure, with the ability to challenge constructively and maintain delivery focus.
•Strong planning and problem-solving skills, with the ability to identify and drive resolution of blockers and dependencies.
•Strong stakeholder management and communication skills across Commercial, Business Analysis, Engineering and QA.
•Able to make capacity constraints, delivery trade-offs and the impact of changing priorities visible.
•Confident use of Jira and practical delivery measures to support planning and visibility.
•Proven experience as a Scrum Master, Agile Delivery Lead or similar within complex software or technology delivery.
•Experience joining established teams where delivery flow, discipline or predictability needs strengthening.
•Experience working across Commercial or business stakeholders, Business Analysis, Engineering and QA within a cross-functional delivery squad.
•Experience balancing planned delivery with BAU, production issues and urgent client demand where demand exceeds available capacity.
•Experience working with distributed or offshore engineering teams.
•Experience managing cross-team dependencies and escalating blockers appropriately.
•Experience improving backlog readiness, sprint planning and overall delivery visibility.
•Experience in insurance, travel technology, financial services or another regulated environment.
•Experience supporting customer-facing digital platforms and API or integration-heavy products.
•Professional Scrum Master, Certified ScrumMaster, SAFe Scrum Master or equivalent practical experience.
Conditions
We offer a competitive reward package designed to support your financial, physical and mental wellbeing, alongside opportunities to learn, develop and be recognised for the contribution you make. Benefits vary by role and location, and full details will be shared as part of the application process.
