Overview


Grounded in versatility and powered by a styling community, Express is a modern, multichannel apparel and accessories brand whose purpose is to Create Confidence & Inspire Self-Expression. Launched in 1980 with the idea that style, quality and value should all be found in one place, Express has been a part of some of the most important and culture-defining fashion trends. The Express Edit design philosophy ensures that the brand is always ‘of the now’ so people can get dressed for every day and any occasion knowing that Express can help them look the way they want to look and feel the way they want to feel.

The Company operates over 550 retail and outlet stores in the United States and Puerto Rico, the express.com online store and the Express mobile app. Express, Inc. is comprised of the brands Express and UpWest, and is traded on the NYSE under the symbol EXPR.


What is Senior Scrum Master at EXPRESS?


The Sr. Scrum Master is a leader of agility practices in the organization, coaching the product, development, and business partners in scrum process and working with the team to continuously improve on velocity stability, reduction in churn, and delivering to project commitments. The Sr. Scrum Master is a servant leader to the teams facilitating all scrum ceremonies including sprint planning, daily scrum, refinement and retrospectives.

This position manages the work for a feature delivery across one or many sprints and ensures the teams are working on the highest priority tasks and are utilized efficiently. They also track delivery against milestones and raises risks and develops mitigation strategies in partnership with product and development management. The Sr. Scrum Master facilitates multiple teams of 15+ people and champions continuous improvement activities to reduce waste, increase productivity and drives change across the organization.

This critical delivery role requires someone who is highly organized, has excellent communication skills across the organization and to various levels within the organization, influences and improves processes across the organization and has an understanding of technical development and the skills and roles required to build, test, and deploy quality software in a fast-paced enterprise.


What you will do:

  • Manage the End-to-End product backlog. Work with product manager to understand the product vision and align upcoming team priorities. Ensure the product owner is building a backlog of ready work.
  • Support the Product Owner in driving story refinement for multiple teams of 15+ developers and QA ensuring the story point estimation guidelines are followed.
  • Drive sprint planning to ensure the team is balancing production support verses project work and planning is completed at least 2 sprints in advance.
  • Interface across the organization to support the delivery of product features including software engineers and architects, user experience, product managers, product owners, and quality assurance testers.
  • Proactively lead and drive the team to continuously make progress against deliverables by ensuring each person is working on the right tasks, helping to remove any obstacles to the team members’ progress, and protecting the team from distractions.
  • Provide transparency in delivery by capturing and reporting on sprint metrics including velocity, story point completion percentage, churn and backlog health. Work with the team to identify opportunities and drive meaningful change in processes across the organization.
  • Report on the status of stories for a feature against the projected delivery date.
  • Manage execution risk and work with the necessary parties across the organization to resolve blockers.
  • Remove distractions from engineering by resolving impediments and any outside issues that may block the ability to develop code.
  • Act as the “go to” resource for the engineering team, providing clarity and priority on tasks, gathering missing requirements, and managing project scope changes.
  • Review sprint metrics with the team and identify opportunities for improvement. Champion continuous improvement activities to reduce waste and increase productivity. Work with the team to establish sprint goals associated with continuous improvement and report on progress against these goals. Drive meaningful change in work processes and tool development to improve the efficiency of the team and drive these across the organization.
  • Create an environment of collaboration within the teams that allows for open dialogue and productive solutions for resolving conflict.


What we are looking for:

  • Education: Bachelor's Degree or related experience
  • Years of Experience: Minimum of 7-10 years as scrum master or equivalent IT leadership position
  • Experience with Atlassian tools, such as JIRA, Confluence.
  • Understanding the importance of QA, and familiar with QA practices to create resilient deliverables.
  • Experience in agile and scrum frameworks and their application in a Product development and delivery organization. Leader in promoting and ensuring adherence to best practices within the team and driving new processes to improve efficiency.
  • Ability to work in a fast-paced agile development environment leading multiple teams responsible for delivering multiple, concurrent projects.
  • Own the scrum process including management of ceremonies, management of and reporting progress against features, and contribute toward release management.
  • Ability to utilize coaching, facilitation, and conflict resolution skills to serve the team.
  • Excellent written and oral communication skills with the ability to influence people at various levels.
  • Facilitate constructive discussions around blockers and risks, working to resolve conflicts and find alternate solutions to challenges.
  • Awareness of cross impacts and ongoing efforts across the eCommerce product to ensure efficiencies.
  • Understanding of the roles and responsibilities of all that are involved in releasing software and the value of each of role.
  • Adaptable with a hunger to continually improve, learning new tools and techniques to better serve the engineering team.
  • Brings transparency to the roadmap and work in progress of the engineering team, growing trust between engineering, the product organization and stakeholders.
  • Experience planning with engineering teams and organizing work in agile environments.
  • Assists in resource and project planning by reporting on current engineering availability, active tasks, and sprint velocity.
  • Experience reporting and creating dashboards that allows outside stake holders to gain visibility into project progress and status.
  • Track and report on sprint metrics. Review the metrics and work with the team to establish goals to incrementally improve efficiency. Report on the progress towards goals and efficiencies gained.


Nice to haves:

  • Knowledge of retail industry.
  • Experience developing and delivering software in an enterprise environment.
  • Understanding of agile development, and basic fundamentals of test-driven development and continuous integration.
  • Strong understanding of the basic fundamentals of software development processes and procedures.
  • Understands the importance of commitments to delivery and milestones made by the development team.


As an equal opportunity employer, Express, Inc. does not discriminate in hiring or terms and conditions of employment on the basis of any federal, state, or locally protected class. Express only hires individuals authorized for employment in Costa Rica. Express is working with Deloitte Consulting CR S.A. on talent recruitment and hiring for its Costa Rica Site Technology team so candidate information compiled by Deloitte Consulting CR S.A. will be shared with Express.