Agile Coach (Contractor)

Overview

The Agile Coach will play a critical role in guiding teams, leaders, and the organization through its agile transformation journey. This individual will serve as a trusted advisor, helping to instill agile principles, improve team performance, and align delivery practices with business outcomes. The ideal candidate has practical/relevant experience in large organizations who has successfully driven the optimization of processes, ensured delivery of value vs. quantity, and fostered a long-lasting continuous improvement mindset across multiple delivery teams.

Key Responsibilities:

Coaching and Mentoring

• Coach multiple delivery teams on expectations around protocol, process, and communication consistency.
• Mentor Product Owners and Delivery Leads on agile best practices and prioritization on items that deliver value.
• Partner with and empower Scrum Masters to be effective change agents and advocates for their teams.
• Support leaders in developing an agile mindset and in applying lean thinking to strategy and execution.

Facilitation and Delivery Support

• Facilitate key ceremonies such as retrospectives, PI planning, and value stream mapping sessions as needed.
• Ensure readiness of Azure DevOps feature and backlog items are maintained between product and delivery teams.
• Assess team maturity and tailor coaching approaches to meet teams where they are in their agile journey.
• Identify additional coaching areas of opportunity where necessary.

Organizational Transformation

• Partner with senior leadership to regularly review and maintain an agility roadmap of transformation progress.
• Lead training, workshops, and one-on-one sessions to build/reinforce agile capability across the organization.
• Document customized processes that are best practices for delivery teams.
• Promote alignment between leadership, portfolio management, and team execution through agile governance and metrics.

Metrics and Continuous Improvement

• Define and track metrics that measure delivery flow, team health, and value realization.
• Analyze trends and provide actionable insights to improve predictability, velocity, and quality.
• Recommend updates to existing dashboard metrics or suggestions for new dashboards to increase transparency.

Required Qualifications:

• 5+ years of experience as an Agile Coach, Senior Scrum Master, or in a similar role guiding multiple teams in an Agile/Lean environment.
• Deep, practical knowledge of Agile principles and frameworks (Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, LeSS) and the ability to contextualize them for different teams.
• Proven track record of coaching and mentoring Product Owners, Delivery Leads, and Scrum Masters to improve their effectiveness and agile maturity.
• Expert facilitator, skilled in leading key ceremonies such as PI Planning, large-scale retrospectives, and value stream mapping workshops.
• Hands-on experience with Azure DevOps (or similar tools like Jira) for managing backlogs, features, and tracking delivery metrics.
• Experience defining, tracking, and analyzing agile metrics (e.g., flow metrics, velocity, team health) to provide data-driven insights for continuous improvement.
•  Agile Coaching certification (e.g., ICP-ACC, ICE-AC, CEC) or advanced Scrum Master certification (e.g., A-CSM, CSP-SM) is preferred. 

About 10Pearls:  

10Pearls is a global, purpose-driven digital technology partner helping our clients re-imagine, digitalize ‎, and accelerate their businesses. As an end-to-end digital partner, 10Pearls helps businesses create transformative ‎digital products incorporating emerging technologies and utilizing our broad expertise in ‎product management, UI/UX, cloud architecture, software development, data science, cybersecurity, and quality assurance. 10Pearls' clients include Global 2000 enterprises, high-growth mid-size ‎businesses, and exciting start-ups across several industries, including healthcare, financial services, ‎energy, education, real estate, and retail. ‎Headquartered in the Washington DC metro area, 10Pearls has a far-reaching global presence with delivery centers in North America, Latin America, Europe, and South Asia.   

The ‎Washington Post has referred to 10Pearls as a double-bottom-line company that balances profits with our responsibility to our communities. Recognized on the Inc. 5000 Fastest-Growing Companies List for the last four years and awarded the #1 Most Diverse Midsize Company in Greater Washington by the Washington Business Journal, we leverage the passions and intelligence of our people to ensure we deliver s