Release Train Engineer

Wellmark, Inc.•Des Moines, IA

22h•Hybrid

About The Position

Help us lead change in direct support of Wellmark’s strategy. Elevate is an enterprise-wide initiative to evolve the way we work and a critical piece of Wellmark's new unified strategy to Make Health Care Better. Adopting Agile principles, a product-focused mindset, and a culture of iterative progress to empower employees will better position the organization to adapt to change, align with our strategic goals and improve the impact on the healthcare industry. Elevate is not about changing who we are but how we work together. The Release Train Engineer (RTE) coaches and supports an agile team of teams known as an agile release train (ART) by steering it to success and navigating the complexity of delivering outcomes in large, distributed environments. Aid in supporting teams through designing solutions with adoption and usage in mind. Facilitates ART activities and ceremonies, helps identify and resolve impediments and manages risks and dependencies. The RTE role is key to implementing the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) and accountable for the overall coordination, execution, and delivery of value through the program while ensuring alignment with company strategy, commitments, and goals.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree or direct and applicable work experience.
Minimum 6 years of experience working as Release Train Engineer or Project/Program Manager working with agile teams, or other applicable change leadership roles.
SAFe Release Train Engineer, SAFe Program Consultant (SPC) certification, or other transferable scaled agile experience within an organization.
Demonstrated agile and/or lean product management competencies of value measurement, optimization and eliminating waste.
Consulting skills required with excellent communication, collaboration, and interpersonal competencies.
Demonstrated facilitation and influencing skills to drive decision-making among stakeholders with diverse perspectives and priorities.
Strong abilities in negotiation skills and techniques used to drive results and hold others accountable while also having the ability to work well in a team environment and build and maintain relationships with other team members, departments, and customers.
Demonstrated ability to communicate complex information in a condensed manner to various stakeholders, verbally and in writing, to achieve shared vision and goals. Ability to contribute to strategic discussions and the definition of business cases.
Strong problem-solving and analytics skills.
Ability to identify risks and deploy appropriate mitigation strategies to meet stakeholder/functional requirements.

Nice To Haves

Tenured experience with SAFe. Prior experience as a Release Train Engineer within a SAFe organization.
Experience using agile requirements management tools (e.g., Jira or Azure DevOps).
Other agile certifications (A-CSM, PSM, or PMI-ACP).

Responsibilities

Informally lead and coach the agile release train (ART) and is seen as one who possesses a strong understanding of agile and can execute and manage agile processes.
Plan, organize and facilitate ART ceremonies (e.g., program increment (PI) planning, ART sync, product owner (PO) sync, scrum of scrums, and demos.
Act as a servant leader and communicator, with strong interpersonal skills, who can facilitate effective discussions of any size across all levels and contribute to the advancement of agile practices in the organization.
Measure ART delivery, maturity, and performance and review metrics with the ART to drive relentless improvement opportunities. Provide guidance and support in tracking and monitoring the execution of epics and features. Guide and facilitate feature and capability estimation by teams.
Demonstrate the comprehension of a lean-agile mindset and practice with the ability to develop others in this area. Coach agile teams and scrum masters on agile and scrum practices.
Manage and optimize the flow of value through the ART by understanding workflows, potential bottlenecks, and encouraging opportunities for improvement.
Work with agile teams to escalate impediments, identify and address risks or impediments to achieving their objectives.
Provide regular and open communication across agile teams and stakeholders on team progress and challenges. Manage and coordinate team dependencies.
Champion the use of key performance indicators (KPIs), objectives and key results (OKRs) and other outcome metrics across teams.
Create timelines, milestones, and cadence of increments and releases for the ART, and oversee the development of reports and analyses to track progress towards goals.
Work with Product Managers, Product Owners, and other stakeholders to ensure alignment between business needs and the work being executed by agile teams.
Understand and operate within lean budgets and ensure adherence to guardrails such as allocating investments within approved budgets. Provide input on resourcing needs to address critical bottlenecks.
Other duties as assigned.