Senior Agile Coach

Cast & Crew · United States · $130,000–$150,000 (stated in the posting)

Apply on the company website

About Us

At Cast & Crew, we’ve empowered creativity and supported the global entertainment industry for decades. Together with our family of brands - Backstage, CAPS, Checks & Balances, Final Draft, Media Services, Sargent-Disc, and The TEAM Companies – we operate as a combined entertainment technology and services provider offering industry standard screenwriting accounting software, digital payroll products, data & reporting, and a host of creative tools.  The industry continues to move faster than ever, and the need for our expertise, our technology, and our people has never been greater.  We are a production’s best ally every step of the way. #OneCastOneCrew

About the Role

We’re seeking a Senior Agile Coach to lead the next stage of agile maturity across Cast & Crew’s Engineering organization. Reporting to the Senior Director, Engineering Operations, and working across teams in our US and India offices, you’ll partner with engineering triads, squads, tribes, and chapters — and with Engineering leadership — to improve how work flows from idea to production.

This is a player-coach role. You’ll coach squads directly while also shaping the organization-level operating model: how engineering teams plan, deliver, measure, and continuously improve. You’ll help scale our internal coaching capability, bring data to every improvement conversation, and lead the responsible adoption of AI across the software development lifecycle. Above all, this role is about outcomes over output — helping teams ship better software, not just more of it.

What You’ll Do

Agile Transformation & Operating Model

• Define and evolve Cast & Crew’s ways of working — definitions of ready and done, working agreements, cadences, and an end-to-end delivery value stream from idea to production

• Run periodic squad maturity and health assessments, using the results to target coaching where it will have the greatest impact

• Guide teams in executing within the flow framework, while keeping consistency on the practices that matter for organizational visibility and predictability

• Support adoption of Team Topologies principles — cognitive load awareness, clear team interactions, and fast flow of value — at the squad and tribe level

• Partner with Engineering leadership to establish process governance, such as a process improvement council, so standards are owned, reviewed, and sustained

• Recommend opportunities to simplify and consolidate engineering delivery tooling and workflows, reducing friction and cost

Team Flow & Delivery

• Coach multiple squads to plan, deliver, and continuously improve — helping them execute against committed work with predictability and confidence

• Make flow visible at the team and org level — where work enters, queues up, gets blocked, and exits — so teams and leaders can see and improve delivery

• Facilitate quarterly and program-level planning, helping teams identify, visualize, and proactively manage cross-team dependencies that affect delivery predictability and release readiness

• Help teams identify and resolve impediments, escalating systemic blockers to Engineering Operations and Engineering leadership when patterns emerge across teams

• Foster healthy collaboration within the triad (Product & UX, Engineering, QA) and with the team Anchor, ensuring each squad operates as a high-trust, balanced unit

Flow Metrics, Reporting & Continuous Improvement

• Own the agile and flow metrics framework for coached teams — cycle time, lead time, throughput, work-in-progress, predictability, deployment frequency, change failure rate, and defect trends

• Lead engaging, blameless retrospectives and root cause analyses that produce concrete, owned action items — and follow through cycle over cycle

• Run improvement experiments grounded in evidence, coaching teams to read metrics as signals for learning, not as performance scorecards, and to guard against perverse incentives and gaming

• Use flow data to identify manual bottlenecks and wait states that are good candidates for automation, and track the impact of automation on cycle time, deployment frequency, and change failure rate

• Track and report technical debt trends, such as the volume logged, the share of capacity spent on paydown, and the link to defect rates and cycle time, so leadership can see its impact on delivery

Coaching Capability & Training & Communities of Practice

• Coach and mentor internal agile coaches, Engineering Managers, Anchors, and team leaders so they can independently facilitate team operations and continuous improvement

• Design and deliver hands-on training and workshops on agile fundamentals, squad ceremonies, estimation, and flow metrics, using interactive, cohort-style formats

• Contribute to the Engineering Operations coaching library — standards, playbooks, templates, and facilitation guides

Engineering Standards & Outcomes Over Output

• Facilitate adherence to engineering and delivery standards: definition of ready, definition of done, story sizing, code review practices, and release management requirements

• Champion Cast & Crew’s release train cadence, code freeze policies, and shift-left quality practices at the team level

• Coach teams to replace manual, repetitive steps in their delivery process with automation, including automated testing, build and deployment pipelines, and Jira workflow rules. The goal is to reduce handoffs, wait time, and human error

• Partner with Engineering Operations, DevOps, and QA leadership to help teams adopt CI/CD practices and increase test automation coverage, supporting the long-term vision of fully automated, on-demand releases

• Help teams define what counts as technical debt, using a consistent way to identify, categorize, and log it in Jira so it’s visible and not tribal knowledge

• Coach teams and Engineering Managers to manage technical debt deliberately. That means sizing and prioritizing it alongside feature work, setting aside a sustainable share of capacity for paydown, and making the tradeoffs explicit in planning conversations

• Help teams hold a high quality bar through good engineering hygiene, including test coverage, peer-reviewed work, and disciplined definitions of done, so new debt isn’t created faster than it’s retired

• Coach teams to measure success by value delivered, defect rates, and customer impact — not by story point velocity alone

• Reframe team conversations around tradeoffs — scope, quality, capacity, risk, and timelines — so commitments are honest and outcomes are real

• Foster safe team environments where people can raise risks, surface blockers, and challenge assumptions constructively

What We’re Looking For

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years coaching agile software development teams (Scrum Master, Agile Coach, Delivery Coach, or equivalent), including experience leading agile transformation across multiple teams

• Deep working knowledge of Scrum, Kanban, lean, and scaled agile practices, with strong fluency in flow concepts (WIP limits, queues, batch size, cycle time)

• Demonstrated experience using flow and delivery metrics (cycle time, lead time, throughput, defect trends, DORA metrics) to drive measurable team and organizational improvement

• Strong facilitation skills, with proven ability to run productive planning sessions and retrospectives and to resolve team conflict constructively

• Advanced hands-on experience with Jira and Confluence, including workflow configuration, automation, and dashboarding

• Hands-on experience using AI tools within agile coaching or engineering operations work — able to speak to specific tools used, workflow integration, and measurable business impact — with a drive to keep experimenting with emerging AI capabilities

• Excellent communication skills and the ability to coach across roles — from individual engineers to Engineering Managers and engineering leadership

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building internal coaching capability, such as mentoring junior coaches or establishing an Agile Center of Excellence or guild structure

• Experience working in a distributed, multi-time-zone organization (including India-based teams)

• Experience with Jellyfish, eazyBI, or comparable engineering intelligence and reporting platforms

• Familiarity with Team Topologies, the Spotify model, Extreme Programming (XP), DevOps, and CI/CD practices

• Experience coaching teams through DevOps and CI/CD adoption, including test automation practices such as TDD, BDD, and ATDD

• Background in B2B SaaS, payments, payroll, or entertainment/production-related industries

• Relevant certifications (SAFe SPC, ICAgile ICP-ACC or ICP-ATF, CSM/CSP, Kanban University) are a plus but not required

What Success Looks Like

• Measurable improvements in flow metrics — cycle time, throughput, and predictability — across coached squads and at the org level

• A clear, adopted operating model for planning and delivery that engineering teams recognize and follow

• Leadership has trusted, timely visibility into delivery health through dashboards and reviews that inform real decisions

• Retrospectives and RCAs that generate completed improvements and a demonstrable shift toward quality outcomes — lower defect rates and reduced rework

• Coached teams show measurable progress toward automation: higher test automation coverage, fewer manual release steps, and increased deployment frequency

• Technical debt is visible, prioritized, and actively managed on every coached team, with a steady investment in paydown and a declining trend in debt-related defects and rework

• AI is embedded in day-to-day engineering workflows, with adoption and impact that can be measured

• Internal coaches, Engineering Managers, and Anchors independently run effective ceremonies and improvement practices with reduced reliance on outside facilitation

• Strong feedback from team members, Engineering Managers, and Anchors on coaching impact and team health

We take care of our people.
When you join Cast & Crew, you're backed by a benefits package built around what matters most. From comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage, to a 401(k) match, generous PTO, paid parental leave, health and wellness programs, tuition reimbursement, and employee discounts. We’re committed to helping you thrive, professionally, and personally.

Benefits are subject to eligibility requirements.

Cast & Crew is an equal opportunity employer committed to hiring a diverse workforce and sustaining an inclusive culture. It is our policy to provide equal employment opportunities to all individuals based on job-related qualifications and ability to perform a job, without regard to age, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, color, religion, creed, national origin, disability, genetic information, veteran status, citizenship or marital status, and to maintain a non-discriminatory environment free from intimidation, harassment or bias based upon these grounds.

More jobs at Cast & Crew