ABOUT US:

Kestra Holdings offers industry-leading wealth management platforms for independent wealth management professionals nationwide. With an innovative culture that celebrates independence, the company seeks to redefine the future of the advisory industry through superior service, cutting-edge technology, and preeminent resources that every financial professional needs to succeed in the market now and in the years to come.

Kestra Holdings companies collectively oversee $123 billion in assets under administration (AUA) and support more than 2,400+ independent financial professionals across the country in delivering comprehensive securities, trust, and investment advisory services to their clients. Located in the “Silicon Hills” of Austin, Texas, Kestra Holdings offers an experience as unique as the city in which it operates.

This is an exciting role at Kestra Financial Holdings, at the parent company level, that will give you a great opportunity to achieve a set of high visibility and business critical initiatives. Your primary focus is to guide performance, collaboration, and execution while working constructively within the team and with members of the organization.

As the Scrum Master with the Data Engineer team you will:

• Use Agile ceremonies that produce the benefits intended by the Agile framework including planning of releases, removing impediments, providing guidance, and supporting Agile teams to provide high-quality products using inspect and adapt cycles.
• Accelerate the learning and growth of one or more Agile teams in developing a lean-Agile mindset, improving practices, and guiding them to more predictable delivery of high-quality products.
• Oversee the use of an accurate, complete, readable, single source for artifacts and workflow information that we need to engage in planning, observe/monitor work in progress, and measure the inspect and adapt cycle at the scrum team level.
• Manage full alignment across dependent teams within a release train; manage risks and dependencies such that all parties are aligned with delivery strategy and sequence. Drive over-communication as necessary to ensure a shared understanding of dependencies.
• Proactively identify and communicate impediments to expedite resolution.
• Promote scrum team accountability for ensuring the sprint commitment is less than / very close to the average velocity over the last five sprints, maximizing the likelihood of delivery on sprint commitments
  
  

RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Improve releases for multiple teams and allow the Data Engineering organization to focus on delivery
• Independently represent technical teams in Change Advisory Boards
• Manage projects with short- and long-term horizon.
• Remove obstacles and manage risks to ensure team effectiveness
• Ensure all scrum activities are tracked, updated and reported daily
  
  

Primary Responsibilities:

• Work with Product Owners and team members to learn and practice healthy backlog management and prioritization practices
• Facilitate the execution and improvement of backlog refinement
• Prepare for and facilitate release planning with teams
• Help with dependency management and cross team coordination
  
  

Agile Ceremony Facilitation

• Facilitate continuous improvement and the development of a learning culture on teams
• Conduct all Scrum related activities, including sprint planning, daily scrum meetings, sprint retrospectives
• Facilitate ceremonies, collaboration, communication, and conflict management
• Teach new team members Agile mindset and frameworks, practices, and process
• Influence us in the removal of organizational impediments and development of healthy Agile practices
• Mentor Product Owners and team members in Agile practices and continuous improvement
  
  

Delivery Team Support

• Remove impediments to the team's ability to perform
• Help coordinate operational issue resolution
• Facilitate team development, mediate conflicts protecting the team and encourage healthy team dynamics.
• Foster team responsibility, self-accountability, and transparency
• Use coaching skills to help the team learn to solve its own problems
  
  

Advice and Guidance

• Introduce and encourage the team to explore healthy Agile development practices, predictable delivery, automation, and continuous delivery
• Teach and encourage a balanced backlog that provides valuable features for customers, reduces technical debt, provides value, and enables product sustainability
• Help the team to develop and analyze metrics to facilitate team improvements
• Promote transparency through healthy communications and data integrity
  
  

SKILLS:

• Understanding of data engineering skills: SSIS/Azure/SQL/APIs/Data Lake/Data Warehouse/etc. is preferable
• Experience using Atlassian suite (Jira, Confluence).
• Experience with Agile software development methodologies, values, and procedures.
• Experience working with Agile methodology on large-scale, technically complex projects for a large enterprise.
• Thorough understanding of the software development life cycle.
• Must guide decisions and able to deal with projects and deadlines.
• Set clear sprint performance standards, resolve sprint performance issues, keep team engaged and on task.
  
  

EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE:

• Bachelor's Degree in Information Systems, Information Technology, Computer Science, related field or Equivalent Experience.
• Must have 5+ years Scrum Master Experience.
• 10+ years of overall technology experience
• Experience working in the financial industry and aware of basic financial concepts
• Prior programming experience a huge plus
• Previous experience writing any object-oriented programming language
• Experience taking Business requirement and writing technical requirement using BDD
• Kanban experience
  
  

CERTIFICATIONS:

• Certified Scrum Master (preferred)
  
  

INTERNAL APPLICANT POLICY:

Internal applicants must be in good standing and have a minimum of 1 year of service with Kestra. Internal applicants must also have a minimum of 1 year service in current role unless approved by EVP.

BENEFITS:

Full health, vision, dental. 401(k) plans along with a host of voluntary plans such as car insurance, legal services and more.

DISCLOSURE

By applying to a job at Kestra Financial, Inc., you are agreeing to the following statements:

• You acknowledge that if hired, Kestra Financial, Inc. may, obtain and use background information concerning your credit, character, general reputation, personal characteristics, work habits, performance and experience for evaluation for your potential employment.
• It is the policy of Kestra Financial to ensure equal employment opportunity without discrimination or harassment on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender, identity or expression, age, disability, marital status, citizenship, national origin, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by law. Kestra Financial prohibits any such discrimination or harassment.
  
  

KESTRA VALUES:

Our Mission is Powering Financial Independence, enabling the growth and success of investing clients and the advisors who serve them. We do that by living our values: SERVE, MAKE IT HAPPEN, and ONE TEAM.