Senior Product Owner / Scrum Master

Overview

Summary

The Senior Product Owner / Scrum Master will play a key role in supporting Agile software delivery for a large-scale federal IT modernization program. This individual will serve in a dual capacity, providing product ownership and Scrum Master leadership for an Agile development team.

The Senior Product Owner / Scrum Master will be responsible for translating business and customer needs into actionable requirements, managing and prioritizing the product backlog, facilitating Agile ceremonies, and ensuring the team delivers high-quality solutions aligned with program objectives and customer expectations.

The ideal candidate combines strong product ownership and requirements management capabilities with practical experience leading Agile teams within a SAFe environment. This individual will collaborate closely with government stakeholders, program leadership, technical leads, architects, developers, testers, and other Scrum teams to drive delivery execution, manage dependencies, and continuously improve team performance.

Responsibilities

What You’ll Do

• Serve as both Product Owner and Scrum Master for an Agile development team, balancing product direction, backlog ownership, and effective Agile delivery.
• Collaborate with government stakeholders, business users, and program leadership to understand business needs, gather requirements, and translate them into actionable features, capabilities, and user stories.
• Own and manage the team’s product backlog, ensuring requirements are clearly defined, appropriately prioritized, and aligned with program objectives and customer priorities.
• Develop, refine, and maintain user stories, acceptance criteria, process flows, and supporting documentation to ensure requirements are understood and actionable by the development team.
• Lead backlog refinement sessions and work closely with technical leads, architects, developers, and testers to ensure stories are sufficiently elaborated and ready for implementation.
• Facilitate Agile ceremonies, including Daily Stand-ups, Sprint Planning, Sprint Reviews, Retrospectives, and other team-level planning and coordination activities.
• Support Program Increment (PI) Planning, including preparation of features and stories, capacity planning, dependency identification, risk management, and alignment of team commitments with program objectives.
• Monitor sprint execution and delivery progress, identify impediments and risks, facilitate resolution, and proactively communicate potential impacts to program leadership and stakeholders.
• Coordinate with other Product Owners, Scrum Masters, technical leads, and cross-functional teams to manage dependencies, align priorities, and support integrated program delivery.
• Work closely with the development and testing teams to ensure delivered functionality meets defined acceptance criteria, quality expectations, and customer requirements.
• Support backlog management and prioritization of technical debt, defects, enhancements, and modernization initiatives.
• Leverage Jira and Confluence to maintain product backlogs, sprint plans, requirements documentation, delivery metrics, and team collaboration artifacts.
• Track and communicate Agile delivery metrics, including sprint predictability, velocity, team capacity, backlog health, defect trends, and PI objective achievement.
• Promote continuous improvement through retrospectives, process optimization, Agile coaching, and adoption of effective engineering and delivery practices.
• Support the adoption of AI-assisted tools and practices to improve requirements development, user story elaboration, documentation, backlog management, and overall delivery efficiency.

Qualifications and Education

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree and typically 8–10 years of related experience in Product Ownership, Business Analysis, Scrum Master responsibilities, Agile delivery, or IT project delivery.
• Demonstrated experience serving as a Product Owner and/or Scrum Master for enterprise software development teams using Agile methodologies.
• Strong understanding of Agile principles, Scrum practices, and the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), including team-level execution and Program Increment planning.
• Proven experience managing product backlogs, defining and prioritizing features and user stories, and developing clear, measurable acceptance criteria.
• Experience translating complex business and stakeholder requirements into actionable functional requirements, user stories, and deliverable work items.
• Demonstrated ability to facilitate Agile ceremonies, manage sprint execution, identify and resolve impediments, and drive continuous improvement.
• Experience working with cross-functional software development teams, including developers, QA engineers, business analysts, UX/UI designers, and technical architects.
• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills, with the ability to engage effectively with government customers, business stakeholders, technical teams, and program leadership.
• Experience using Jira and Confluence for Agile project management, backlog administration, requirements documentation, and delivery reporting.
• Ability to analyze Agile delivery metrics, identify trends, and use data to improve team performance, delivery predictability, and overall execution.
• Strong organizational, analytical, problem-solving, and conflict-resolution skills.
• Ability to manage competing priorities, coordinate dependencies, and operate effectively in a dynamic, multi-team delivery environment.
• Availability during core business hours of 9:00 AM–5:00 PM Eastern Time.
• Ability to obtain and maintain a Public Trust Moderate Risk Background Investigation (MBI), Tier 2.
• Must reside in the District of Columbia, Maryland, or Virginia.

Compensation

The proposed salary range for this role is $****** to $******* USD. The salary range provided is a good faith estimate representative of all experience levels. Karsun considers several factors when extending an offer, including but not limited to, the role, function and associated responsibilities, a candidate’s work experience, location, education/training, and key skills.