Team Performance Enigneer

The Role

We're looking for someone who sees Scrum as a stepping stone, not a destination. Your job is to help teams discover faster ways of working—using data to illuminate what's actually happening, coaching with a light touch so teams own their improvements, and gradually evolving from sprint-based delivery toward continuous flow as the team matures.

This isn't a traditional Scrum Master role. We need someone fluent in Lean principles—cycle time, WIP limits, batch size reduction, flow efficiency—who can establish baseline practices with distributed teams and then systematically help them get faster. You'll use Scrum ceremonies as initial scaffolding, but your north star is reducing time-to-value, not perfecting sprint rituals.

The right person is equally comfortable setting up a kanban board, running a data-driven retrospective, and explaining to a skeptical developer why limiting work-in-progress actually makes them faster. You'll work in an FDA-regulated IVD software environment where 'faster and safer' aren't in tension—better flow practices produce both.

What You'll Actually Do

Make Flow Visible

• Establish and maintain metrics that reveal how work actually moves through the team—cycle time, lead time, throughput, WIP, flow efficiency
• Build dashboards that teams check daily, not reports leadership reviews monthly
• Help teams see their own patterns: where work stalls, what causes variability, which practices correlate with faster delivery
• Track DORA metrics and help the team understand what they mean for their specific context

Run Experiments, Not Ceremonies

• Design small, time-boxed process experiments with clear hypotheses and success criteria
• Facilitate retrospectives that generate testable improvements, not vague action items
• Systematically reduce ceremony overhead as the team matures—shorter standups, less frequent planning, async where it works better
• Document what works and what doesn't so we build institutional knowledge about effective practices

Coach with a Light Touch

• Help teams interpret their own data rather than prescribing solutions
• Ask questions that lead to insight: 'What do you think is causing this?' not 'Here's what you should do'
• Make new practices stick through habit formation, not mandates—small changes, visible progress, intrinsic motivation
• Build team capability to self-diagnose and self-improve so they eventually don't need you

Enable Faster Flow

• Identify and remove systemic impediments—not just daily blockers, but structural friction
• Work with technical leads to reduce batch sizes, shorten feedback loops, and enable smaller deployments
• Help the team evolve from 'done at sprint end' toward continuous delivery as practices mature
• Coordinate across teams when dependencies create delays, but work to eliminate dependencies over time

Navigate AI-Augmented Development

• Experiment with how AI tools change estimation, code review, testing, and other development practices
• Measure the actual impact of AI-assisted workflows—are we faster? higher quality? both?
• Help the team develop principles for effective human-AI collaboration
• Stay current on emerging practices and bring relevant ideas back to the team

What We're Looking For

Required Experience

• 3+ years helping teams improve delivery performance—title matters less than results
• Demonstrated use of flow metrics (cycle time, throughput, WIP) to drive decisions, not just velocity
• Experience with distributed teams across time zones
• Technical background (former developer, QA, or similar) so you understand what the team actually does
• Track record of measurable improvement: reduced cycle time, improved predictability, higher throughput

Preferred Experience

• Regulated environment experience (healthcare, financial services, or similar)—FDA ideal but not required
• Familiarity with Lean/Kanban beyond the basics—you've actually implemented WIP limits and measured the impact
• Experience helping teams transition from Scrum toward continuous flow
• Exposure to AI-assisted development tools and interest in how they change team dynamics
• DORA metrics familiarity—deployment frequency, lead time, MTTR, change failure rate

The Mindset We Need

• Principles over practices: You understand why Agile/Lean practices work, which means you know when to break the rules
• Data-informed, not data-obsessed: You use metrics to start conversations, not end them
• Patient impatience: You want things to be faster but know sustainable change takes time
• Comfortable with ambiguity: You can navigate 'we don't know yet' and design experiments to find out
• Ego-light: Your goal is team capability, not personal indispensability

How We'll Know It's Working

Within 6 months, we expect to see:

• Baseline flow metrics established and visible to the team daily
• Measurable reduction in cycle time or increase in throughput (you'll set specific targets with the team)
• At least 3 documented process experiments—hypotheses, measurements, learnings
• Team can articulate their own flow patterns and identify improvement opportunities
• Reduced ceremony overhead without loss of coordination effectiveness
• DORA metrics tracked with team understanding of what influences them

What This Role Isn't

To be direct about fit:

• Not a ceremony facilitator: If your primary skill is running good standups and retrospectives, this isn't the role
• Not a Scrum purist: If deviation from the Scrum Guide feels wrong, we're not aligned
• Not a project manager: If you default to directing work rather than enabling teams, this won't fit
• Not SAFe-focused: If you see more process as the answer, we're moving opposite directions

Working Environment

• FDA-regulated IVD software development—quality and speed aren't tradeoffs, they're both required
• Distributed team across time zones including India
• AI-augmented development environment—we're actively experimenting with how AI changes software development
• Transformation in progress—moving from slow, manual practices toward continuous delivery
• Small, high-capacity team philosophy

Why This Matters

We're building diagnostic software that affects patient outcomes. Every day we spend stuck in slow processes is a day we're not delivering value to the people who need it. The regulatory environment demands rigor, but it doesn't demand slowness—better flow practices actually produce better compliance documentation than manual heroics.

You'll have real influence over how we work. This isn't a role where you maintain existing practices—it's a role where you help us discover what practices should exist.

Reports to: Digital Products Omics Software Leader