Scrum Master
Scotiabank · Toronto
Requisition ID: 269874
Join a purpose driven winning team, committed to results, in an inclusive and high-performing culture.
The Team
The Scrum Master is a hands-on delivery leadership role responsible for enabling high-performing Agile teams while remaining actively engaged in day-to-day execution. This role combines Scrum facilitation, delivery management, operational coordination, dependency tracking, release readiness, and stakeholder alignment. The Scrum Master partners closely with Product Owners, engineering teams, infrastructure, security, operations, and business stakeholders to keep delivery predictable and unblocked.
Is this role right for you? In this role, you will:
- This role is designed for a proactive, high-energy professional who does not only facilitate ceremonies, but also drives outcomes, follows through on actions, removes impediments, strengthens team collaboration, and helps the team continuously improve its delivery flow.
Some of the key accountabilities include:
Agile Delivery Leadership and Scrum Excellence
- Facilitate effective Scrum ceremonies, including Sprint Planning, Daily Stand-ups, Backlog Refinement, Sprint Reviews, and Retrospectives.
- Coach the team on Agile values, Scrum principles, transparency, inspection, adaptation, and continuous improvement.
- Encourage team-led ceremonies, shared ownership, and self-organization while maintaining clear accountability for outcomes.
- Protect the team from unmanaged work while enabling fast pivots when priorities change.
2. Product Owner Partnership and Backlog Health
- Build a strong working partnership with Product Owners and regularly review the roadmap, priorities, dependencies, and delivery commitments.
- Maintain a healthy, prioritized, and refined backlog aligned with current objectives and business value.
- Ensure user stories are clear, actionable, estimable, and ready before sprint commitments are made.
- Support prioritization conversations by making capacity, dependencies, risks, and trade-offs transparent.
3. Hands-On Delivery Tracking and Blocker Removal
- Stay close to the team's daily work by actively monitoring Jira boards, sprint progress, risks, blockers, dependencies, and action items.
- Identify impediments early and drive them to closure rather than simply escalating them.
- Coordinate with external teams such as network, database, cloud, identity, cybersecurity, infrastructure, and operations to remove delivery barriers.
- Create, track, and follow up on operational requests in Jira, ServiceNow, Confluence, or similar enterprise delivery tools.
4. Stakeholder Alignment and Cross-Functional Collaboration
- Act as the connective layer between business, technology, operations, and governance teams.
- Build tight collaboration across stakeholders to avoid silos between business and IT.
- Provide timely and transparent status updates covering progress, risks, dependencies, decisions, and required support.
- Stay close to customers, users, and stakeholders to capture feedback and maintain alignment with business outcomes.
5. Release, Change, and Operational Readiness Support
- Support release planning, deployment coordination, change management activities, approvals, evidence collection, and communication when required.
- Help validate readiness across DEV, QA, UAT, and production release milestones.
- Ensure delivery artifacts, approvals, risks, and go-live readiness items are traceable and audit-ready.
- Coordinate release impacts and timing to minimize disruption and maintain stakeholder confidence.
6. Team Health, Coaching, and Continuous Improvement
- Maintain regular one-on-one conversations with team members to gather feedback, remove concerns, and support growth.
- Foster an environment of trust, accountability, collaboration, and shared responsibility.
- Use delivery metrics such as velocity, burndown, cycle time, throughput, and cumulative flow to identify bottlenecks and improvement opportunities.
- Ensure retrospective actions are documented, owned, implemented, and reviewed for measurable impact.
Do you have the skills that will enable you to succeed in this role? We'd love to work with you if you have:
Scrum Master Success Habits
- Keep a strong, ongoing partnership with Product Owners and review the roadmap and backlog regularly.
- Maintain a healthy, prioritized backlog aligned with current goals, delivery commitments, and stakeholder expectations.
- Reinforce Scrum values while empowering the team to self-organize and own delivery outcomes.
- Encourage team-led ceremonies, shared ownership, and clear accountability.
- Stay close to the team's work through Jira, progress tracking, blocker management, and daily follow-up.
- Enable fast pivots by helping the team assess impact, reprioritize work, and maintain delivery momentum.
- Build strong collaboration across business and IT so work is not delayed by silos or unclear ownership.
- Create focused PODs, clarify responsibilities, and give the team autonomy to deliver.
- Hold regular one-on-one conversations to support feedback, growth, and team engagement.
- Foster connection through in-person and virtual interactions that strengthen team cohesion.
- Maintain alignment with customers, users, and stakeholders through regular feedback loops.
Education
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Systems, Data Science, Engineering, or related discipline.
- Master's degree considered as an asset.
- Do you have the skills that will enable you to succeed in this role?
- 5 years in a Business Analyst role within a Financial Services Institution with experience in Risk domain projects
- Good knowledge of financial risks and processes in Risk technology
- Strong technical and data analytical skills, experience with Google Cloud Platform and/or Azure Databricks.
- Good understanding of current IT practices, systems development techniques, especially requirements specification and testing methodologies
- Results-oriented and highly motivated individual with strong analytical skills
- Excellent communication and interpersonal skills
- University degree or technical institute certificate or related work experience.
What's in it for you?
- Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Allyship - We strive to create an inclusive culture where every employee is empowered to reach their fullest potential, respected for who they are, and are embraced through bias-free practices and inclusive values across Scotiabank. We embrace diversity and provide opportunities for all employee to learn, grow & participate through our various Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) that span across diverse gender identities, ethnicity, race, age, ability & veterans.
- Accessibility and Workplace Accommodations - We value the unique skills and experiences everyone brings to the Bank and are committed to creating and maintaining an inclusive and accessible environment for everyone. Scotiabank continues to locate, remove, and prevent barriers so that we can build a diverse and inclusive environment while meeting accessibility requirements.
- Remote-friendly work environment will provide you with the flexibility to perform at your best.
- Upskilling through online courses, cross-functional development opportunities, and tuition assistance.
- Competitive Rewards program including bonus, flexible vacation, personal, sick days and benefits will start on day one.
- Community Engagement - no matter where you choose to work from; we offer opportunities for community engagement & belonging with our various programs
Location(s): Canada : Ontario : Toronto
Scotiabank is a leading bank in the Americas. Guided by our purpose: "for every future", we help our customers, their families and their communities achieve success through a broad range of advice, products and services, including personal and commercial banking, wealth management and private banking, corporate and investment banking, and capital markets.
At Scotiabank, we value the unique skills and experiences each individual brings to the Bank, and are committed to creating and maintaining an inclusive and accessible environment for everyone. If you require accommodation (including, but not limited to, an accessible interview site, alternate format documents, ASL Interpreter, or Assistive Technology) during the recruitment and selection process, please let our Recruitment team know. If you require technical assistance, please click here. Candidates must apply directly online to be considered for this role. We thank all applicants for their interest in a career at Scotiabank; however, only those candidates who are selected for an interview will be contacted.