Delivery Lead / Scrum Master
6 months - with possible extensions
Bristol/Birmingham/London - hybrid
Inside IR35 - Umbrella only
Role Purpose
We are looking for an experienced Delivery Lead / Scrum Master to drive high‑quality delivery across our analytics data and self‑serve reporting teams. This role sits at the heart of our transformation, ensuring smooth delivery of initiatives such as automated reporting, GCP re‑architecture, data product enhancement, and operational change.
You will lead Agile delivery for a cross‑functional squad (engineers, analysts, data modelers, QA, and offshore colleagues), ensuring the team is focused, aligned, and able to deliver outcomes efficiently. You will remove impediments, manage dependencies and vendor teams, and support a culture of continuous improvement and accountability.
This role is central to helping us standardise processes, improve velocity, and ensure high‑quality delivery across our data estate.
Key Responsibilities
Delivery Leadership
- Own day‑to‑day delivery of data analytics workstreams across onshore and offshore teams.
- Manage sprint ceremonies (planning, stand‑ups, refinement, retrospectives) and maintain a healthy backlog in partnership with Product Owners.
- Create and maintain delivery plans, sprint forecasts, risk logs, and dependency maps across multiple squads and parallel initiatives.
- Track delivery progress against KPIs, milestones, and outcomes, escalating blockers early.
Team Enablement & Flow
- Ensure the team is operating effectively and efficiently, optimising flow of work and removing bottlenecks.
- Champion Agile ways of working while adapting pragmatically to the realities of a complex data landscape.
- Monitor capacity across onshore and offshore resources and ensure tasks are aligned to the right skills at the right time.
- Maintain a stable heartbeat of delivery even when dealing with technical debt, re‑architecture activities, or urgent production issues.
Stakeholder & Cross‑Team Collaboration
- Act as the delivery interface between the analytics data and visualisation team and business stakeholders.
- Work closely with data domains, architecture and dependent CFUs to manage cross‑team dependencies.
- Communicate delivery status, risks, and trade‑offs clearly and concisely to senior stakeholders.
Support Strategic Programmes & Change
- Coordinate delivery of major initiatives, including:
- Reporting automation programme
- Self‑serve reporting improvements (Qlik SaaS, Looker, Power BI)
- Data platform re‑architecture on GCP
- Migration of legacy pipelines to strategic sources
- Ensure operational readiness, documentation, and handover into KTLO (keep‑the‑lights‑on) support.
Governance, Quality & Standards
- Uphold data engineering standards, definition‑of‑done criteria, and quality gates across the lifecycle.
- Ensure documentation is captured for new data products, pipelines, dashboards, and design decisions.
- Drive continuous improvement through retrospectives, delivery analytics, and feedback loops.
Required Skills & Experience
Delivery & Agile Expertise
- Strong experience as a Scrum Master, Delivery Lead, or Agile Project Manager within data-focused teams.
- Proven success delivering complex technical work across multiple parallel workstreams.
- Expertise in Agile methodologies (Scrum, Kanban) adapted for data engineering and analytics environments.
Technical Understanding
(Not hands‑on engineering, but able to speak the language.)
- Knowledge of cloud data platforms (ideally GCP), data pipelines, CI/CD, monitoring, and data modelling concepts.
- Experience supporting teams working on BI/reporting tools such as Qlik, Looker, or Power BI.
- Comfortable discussing data lineage, SLAs, dependencies, technical design decisions, and quality controls.
Desirable Experience
- Experience operating in a large enterprise (preferably telco)
- Working with offshore delivery centres and third‑party vendors.
- Exposure to automated reporting programmes, technical debt remediation, or data platform modernisation.
