The posting
Who We Are
Join a team that puts its People First! As a member of the First American family of companies, First American Trust is a federal savings bank that has provided banking, wealth management, and trust solutions on a national, full-service basis for more than five decades. Since 1889, First American (NYSE: FAF) has held an unwavering belief in its people. They are passionate about what they do, and we are equally passionate about fostering an environment where all feel welcome, supported, and empowered to be innovative and reach their full potential. Our inclusive, people-first culture has earned our company numerous accolades, including being named to the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For® list for eleven consecutive years. We have also earned awards as a best place to work for women, diversity and LGBTQ+ employees, and have been included on more than 50 regional best places to work lists. First American will always strive to be a great place to work, for all. For more information, please visit www.careers.firstam.com.
What We Do
First American Trust is seeking an experienced Senior Scrum Master to help agile teams deliver meaningful business outcomes through effective Lean-Agile practices.
The Senior Scrum Master is a senior agile practitioner who serves as a servant leader, coach, facilitator, and change agent. This role helps teams improve effectiveness, delivery flow, transparency, and predictability while supporting First American Trust’s business agility roadmap.
The Senior Scrum Master works closely with Product Owners, delivery teams, leaders, stakeholders, Release Train Engineer and other Senior Scrum Masters to strengthen Agile practices, remove systemic barriers, and improve how work moves from concept to customer value.
What You'll Do:
- Facilitate and drive effective Scrum and Agile events, including daily sync, backlog refinement, iteration planning, iteration reviews, and retrospectives.
- Ensure events are purposeful, well prepared, inclusive, and result in clear decisions, actions, or improvement commitments.
- Coach teams in Scrum, Kanban, Lean-Agile principles, self-organization, collaboration, continuous improvement, and effective delivery practices.
- Build a safe, trusting, and inclusive team environment where concerns can be raised openly and addressed through problem solving.
- Partner with Product Owners to improve backlog health, prioritization, refinement, sprint readiness, PI Planning readiness and alignment to customer and business outcomes.
- Help teams establish meaningful sprint goals and improve delivery predictability, quality, flow, and accountability.
- Independently identify, understand, track, escalate, and help remove impediments, risks, dependencies, and organizational barriers.
- Lead structured problem-solving conversations that help teams and stakeholders address the causes of delivery challenges.
- Protect the team from unnecessary interruptions while maintaining appropriate transparency with stakeholders and leadership.
- Use Jira and other Agile tools to maintain accurate delivery information and communicate relevant metrics, trends, risks, dependencies, and progress.
- Use delivery metrics to support transparency, learning, and improvement rather than individual performance evaluation.
- Facilitate retrospectives that produce meaningful, documented improvement actions and coach team to follow through on those commitments.
- Coordinate with engineering leaders, managers, architects, business partners, and other Scrum Masters to resolve cross-team challenges.
- Represent the team in Coach Sync, ART Sync, and other ART-level coordination events.
- Help teams prepare for and participate effectively in PI Planning, including readiness, planning inputs, objectives, dependencies, risks, and commitments.
- Collaborate with other Senior Scrum Masters and Agile practitioners to share effective practices, lessons learned, facilitation techniques, and approaches for improving team and organizational agility.
- Contribute to the Lean-Agile Office’s business agility roadmap and the continued evolution of First American Trust’s Agile operating model.
- Demonstrate servant leadership, situational awareness, emotional intelligence adaptability, and a growth mindset.
What You'll Bring:
- 5-7 years of experience applying Scrum and Agile methods as scrum master of an agile software delivery team.
- Prefer 1-2 years of experience in the Scaled Agile Framework.
- Experience coaching Agile teams across different team sizes, levels of maturity, and delivery contexts.
- Strong knowledge of Scrum, Kanban, Lean-Agile principles, and continuous improvement practices.
- Demonstrated ability to lead Scrum events and create environments that promote participation, accountability, transparency, and psychological safety.
- Experience coaching teams and Product Owners on Agile practices, backlog health, collaboration, and delivery effectiveness.
- Demonstrated ability to identify, escalate, and resolve impediments, delivery risks, dependencies, and organizational barriers.
- Strong understanding of backlog management, prioritization, refinement, sprint planning, sprint goals, and outcome-based delivery.
- Moderate to expert-level experience with Jira or comparable Agile delivery tools.
- Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to communicate clearly with technical and nontechnical audiences and senior leadership.
- Strong facilitation, conflict-resolution, negotiation, stakeholder-management, and problem-solving skills.
- Ability to influence without formal authority and work effectively in a cross-functional, fast-moving environment.
- Certified ScrumMaster or SAFe Advanced Scrum Master certification is required.
- Bachelor’s degree in Business, Information Technology, or related fields.
Pay Range: $112,400.00 - $149,800.00 Annually
This hiring range is a reasonable estimate of the base pay range for this position at the time of posting. Pay is based on a number of factors which may include job-related knowledge, skills, experience, business requirements and geographic location.
** Note that the following statements only apply to candidates who will be working from an unincorporated area within Los Angeles County. **
First American will consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with arrest or conviction records, in a manner consistent with the requirements of applicable state and local laws (e.g., the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act).
First American intends to conduct a review of an applicant’s criminal history in connection with a conditional offer. First American reasonably believes that a criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following material job duties for this position potentially resulting in the withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment: handling of confidential, proprietary or trade secret information belonging to First American or its customers, administrating or facilitating financial transactions, and the ability to meet customer-imposed criminal history requirements.
What We Offer
By choice, we don’t simply accept individuality – we embrace it, we support it, and we thrive on it! Our People First culture is inclusive for all employees - not just because it's the right thing to do, but because it's the key to our success. We are proud to foster an authentic and inclusive workplace For All. You are free and encouraged to bring your entire, unique self to work. First American is an equal opportunity employer in every sense of the term.
Based on eligibility, First American offers a comprehensive benefits package including medical, dental, vision, 401k, PTO/paid sick leave and other great benefits like an employee stock purchase plan.
