Consultant, Agile Leader

Nationwide Mutual Insurance • Columbus, OH

9d • Hybrid

About The Position

Nationwide Technology is seeking a Consultant, Agile Leader to support the Pillars of Annuity line within the Annuity Modernization Program. This role will lead Agile delivery across a large, complex environment with strong business and technology partnerships. If you’re enthusiastic about delivering secure technology solutions to support a company providing extraordinary care to its customers, then Nationwide Technology is the place for you. Nationwide's industry-leading technology workforce embraces an agile work environment and a collaborative culture to deliver outstanding solutions and results. As an Agile Lead, you will coach a robust, self-organized Agile Team(s) responsible for building software solutions with the best technology, processes, and tools. You will collaborate to deliver business outcomes, using appropriate software delivery practices (e.g., Scrum, Kanban, Lean) to continuously improve software delivery efficiency, and quality. You will play a key role in guiding delivery from idea inception to implementation and participate in user communities to learn and implement optimal practices.

Requirements

• Experience serving as an Agile Leader, Scrum Master, or similar role in a large-scale technology delivery environment
• Proven experience leading large teams in a complex program
• Strong experience with Agile and Scrum standard work, team coaching, and continuous improvement
• Demonstrated success in change management and leading teams through operating model shifts
• Strong product-centric mindset and ability to connect delivery practices to business outcomes
• Strong facilitation, communication, and stakeholder influence skills
• Experience with Jira is required
• Experience with Microsoft 365 tools is required
• Experience working in large transformation or modernization programs
• Typically, Six years of experience in Agile including three years as an Agile Leader or similar role.
• Strong technical expertise in one or more Agile practices and frameworks, including Scrum, Kanban, and Lean.
• Plus, a technical background in Software Engineering.
• Three or more years working with ALM tools and Microsoft Office Suite.
• Demonstrated ability to coach and mentor team members and peers.
• Ability to manage multiple teams and lead cross team initiatives.
• Strong candidates will put the team first, have excellent communication skills, robust problem-solving ability, conflict resolution skills and be active in the industry.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in insurance, annuities, or financial services
• Experience with Planview
• Understanding of API-based integration patterns
• Kafka experience or familiarity
• Agile certifications such as CSM, PSM, or SAFe
• Agile certification (Certified ScrumMaster – CSM, SAFe ScrumMaster Certification - SSM, Professional ScrumMaster Certification - PSM) and proven experience across multiple teams is a plus.
• Insurance and/or financial services industry knowledge a plus.

Responsibilities

• Lead Agile delivery practices within the Pillars of Annuity line
• Coach team on Agile principles, Scrum standard work, product centricity, and continuous improvement
• Drive cross-team planning, dependency management, and Scrum of Scrums coordination
• Remove blockers, surface risks early, and escalate issues when needed
• Partner with product, engineering, architecture, and delivery leaders to align priorities, sequencing, and capacity
• Ensure work is visible, accurate, and maintained in Jira and supporting tools
• Use delivery insights and team observations to improve predictability, flow, and value delivery
• Lead teams through change and help strengthen accountability, collaboration, and ways of working
• Influences, coaches and mentors team members on Agile practices and principles.
• Removes impediments to the team’s progress; escalate obstacles requiring outside resolution.
• Identifies risks and issues that might have an impact on delivery and provides thought leadership, facilitation, and communication on a mitigation strategy.
• Responsible for applying secure software and systems engineering practices throughout the delivery lifecycle to ensure our data and technology solutions are protected from threats and vulnerabilities.
• Collaborates at the highest level to prioritize work to maximize value towards business outcomes.
• Collaborates with the Agile Team(s) to provide guidance in the areas of analysis, design, development, testing, automation, and deployment while ensuring the usage of the best capability practices.
• Guides and enables DevOps, DataOps, AI/MLOps through the adoption and refinement of Agile practices on our most complex and strategic efforts.
• Monitors and reports on team progress and performance through enterprise and industry metrics while maintaining data quality supporting metric accuracy.
• Collaborates with senior leadership on demand and financials.
• Actively participates in variable staffing functions for the line.
• Facilitates team cadences on business critical, complex efforts (e.g., retrospective, daily standups, and show-and-tell meetings) to encourage collaboration, communication, and feedback within the team; promote a learning culture and challenge the team to be innovative.
• May perform other responsibilities as assigned.

Benefits

• medical/dental/vision
• life insurance
• short and long term disability coverage
• paid time off with newly hired associates receiving a minimum of 18 days paid time off each full calendar year pro-rated quarterly based on hire date
• nine paid holidays
• 8 hours of Lifetime paid time off
• 8 hours of Unity Day paid time off
• 401(k) with company match
• company-paid pension plan
• business casual attire

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: Associate degree