Release Train Engineer

This person will report to an Engineering Director

• Leads a program team consisting of multiple scrum teams (including Scrum Masters, Product Owners, Architects and Software Engineers) to deliver large-scale, program-level business features & capabilities.
• Manages (and appropriately escalates) delivery impediments, risks, issues and changes tied to the product development initiatives. Provides visibility into gaps, issues, risks, opportunities across scrum teams
• Organizes and leads Program Increment Planning events to identify, define and deliver features to produce a clear Product Increment (PI) according to business needs.
• Owner of the project financial management and view in AmEx’s Project Mgmt tool (Clarity)
• Escalates impediments, manages risks, dependencies and resourcing needs
• Aggregates team Program Increment objectives into Program/ Release objectives
• Maintains dependency plan between planned sprints/iterations across engineering, infrastructure, and third parties
• Breaks down barriers and shields the team from impediments precluding engineers from making progress against sprints and deadlines
• Organizes and facilitates scrum-of-scrums and retrospectives at the end of each sprint/iteration, and creates an environment in which the team is continuously learning from the past
• Influences (sometimes without direct authority) through effective change and leadership management.
• Engages with Product Owner, Product Manager, Business Stakeholders and delivery teams to understand business needs and identify appropriate solutions
• Uses their technical acumen to enable removal of impediments, ask probing questions, and support team in technical issue resolution
• Facilitate discussions to identify alternative or different approaches to solve problems, break down barriers and drive resolution of conflicts to ensure productivity of the team.
• Steer and deliver project communications at all levels within Technology and business to ensure transparency of development process and project performance, to coordinate escalation and issue resolution, to facilitate decision making, and to build trust.
• Create an environment of continuous improvement through reflective conversation and regular retrospectives, with the goal to surface issues/concerns and to identify clear action steps.
• Responsible for tracking iteration progress, actively contributing to design discussions, issue resolution and removing obstacles to ensure sprint/iteration commitments are met
• Coaches teams to adopt the Agile values, principles and practices and actively encourage teams to reflect and improve their delivery capacity
• Responsible for programs overall compliance to AmEx’s Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) principles and requirements.

Qualifications

• 6+ years’ and a proven track record leading Agile programs
• 2+ years’ experience working within a scrum team as a Scrum Master or TPM
• 2+ years leading large programs using the Scalable Agile Framework (SAFe certification preferred)
• Strong verbal and written communication skills.
• Ability to effectively communicate to internal and external business partners on solutions and escalations.
• Ability to influence without direct authority and gain alignment
• Ability to facilitate focused discussions to gain consensus
• Ability to steer and deliver communications to all levels of leadership
• Understanding & proven experience tracking project financials, risks, dependencies, etc
• SPC or SA certification required; RTE certification a plus
• PMI ACP Certifications a plus

• Experience with Kanban
• Experience with Clarity
• Experience with Rally, Jira or equivalent Agile tool