Release Train Engineer

The Release Train Engineer (RTE) is a servant leader and coach for an Allied Value Stream (SAFe Agile Release Train), driving the planning, execution, and delivery of value in an Agile environment within complex technical and strategic enterprise initiatives. This role coaches, facilitates the processes and execution, escalates impediments, manages risk, and drives continuous improvement for the value stream teams. This role is key in aligning teams to shared objectives, enabling collaboration, and ensuring successful delivery of business value and strategic outcomes.

Job Duties and Responsibilities:

Facilitation and Coaching (30%)

The RTE is the embodiment of servant leadership. The individual should be driven by a desire to empower teams and coach, adjusting leadership styles to fit the team's needs with limited supervision. Facilitation and Coaching will require:

• Value Stream Team Leadership: Acts as the leader and coach for the value stream (ART), ensuring teams understand and align with the mission, goals, and objectives of the train.
• Coaching Team Members: Provides coaching to Scrum Masters, Product Owners, and team members on Agile practices and principles to improve team dynamics and delivery outcomes. This will include delegating tasks to roles from a place of influence to foster accountability and growth.
• Servant Leadership: Builds trust, encourages open communication, inspires team members to excel and creates psychological safety.
• Change Agent: Drives Agile transformation by promoting Agile principles fostering a mindset of agility and continuous improvement.
• Champion Continuous Improvement: Fosters continuous improvement by facilitating inspect & adapt efforts to evaluate value stream performance and addresses systemic challenges by promoting regular feedback loops to enhance transparency and learning while encouraging teams to experiment. Will also maintain a high-level of awareness regrinding industry best practices/emerging trends and how to apply them.

Value Stream Orchestration (30%)

This role plays a critical role in ensuring the successful execution of program increments (PIs) for the initiative. They oversee cross-functional technology team planning and coordination, aligning efforts with the Product roadmap, initiatives, and key plans to achieve the Product vision. Their contributions include the following duties.

Duties:

Program Increment (PI) Planning:

• Plans and schedules the PI for the teams involved in the value stream, coaching as necessary to ensure all team members understand the expectations and are prepared to participate.
• Coordinate planning efforts with other teams - Multiple cross-divisional teams may need to align and collaborate to deliver the best outcomes. This role works across all teams in the value stream establishing and communicating what needs to be addressed, when, and ensures objectives and commitments are agreed to and shared with all teams.
• Ensures all teams are ready for PI planning by understanding the business context, vision, and expected outcomes. Ensuring the backlog is aligned with strategic priorities and ready for planning.
• Collaborates with Product Management, Software Product Management, Architects, Tech Leads, and other impacted teams & stakeholders to ensure the value stream backlog is prioritized and prepared for planning sessions.

Execution Tracking:

• Document and communicate the plans and commitments created during a PI
• Assists in tracking the completion of epics in the initiative backlog and ensure the teams use the system demos effectively as the primary measure of progress.
• Foster collaboration across teams, ensuring that objectives are well understood, and potential roadblocks are identified early.
• Facilitates "scrum of scrums" and other ceremonies as needed to support the delivery of business value for the value stream.
• Ensures that teams can focus on value delivery by removing impediments that might hinder progress.
• Ensure a plan is built, practices used, appropriate efforts and teams are engaged for effective execution of organizational change to maximize adoption.

Release Coordination:

• Support Value Stream backlog refinement -collaborates with the initiative leadership, Business and Software Product Managers, Product Owners, and other stakeholders to help ensure the backlog remains aligned with strategy. They identify and apply measures that enable the value stream to achieve a smooth, predictable flow of business value.
• Align and coordinate releases across multiple teams and external dependencies to ensure predictable delivery.
• Supports economic decision-making for epics, facilitating feature creation by the teams. The RTE helps Business Owners coordinate and communicate effectively across the value stream. They operate within approved budgets for revenue and costs.
• Involving Value Stream Owners, Product Owners, and other stakeholders, the RTE ensures leadership and teams are aligned on vision, priorities, and prepared with the right content for a given ceremony.

Optimizing Flow (20%)

This role is responsible for maintaining or improving flow within their value stream. The duties associated with this work include cross-functional communication, analysis, delegation, and the implementation of changes. The impacts may include leadership, value stream teams (internal, client, and suppliers), and impacted stakeholders.

Duties:

• Maintain clear and effective stakeholder communication, including initiative or strategic owners, product management, development management, or leadership.
• Determines the value stream tracking methodology (ex: Kanban) to ensure a smooth flow of value. Work with others to visualize all features in progress. Identify flow states and maintain work in progress thresholds across the teams of the value stream.
• Establish value stream flow measures which includes flow metrics such as flow predictability. Facilitate determining methodology for estimating/sizing efforts that provides consistent measurement of team metrics across inter-connected software product teams working independently.
• Improve the flow of value by assessing and improving the practices associated with the continuous delivery pipeline. Coordinate impediment removal and address or escalate blockers that the teams cannot resolve independently.
• Assist with mapping the value streams with the agile teams and stakeholders. This involves identifying all the delivery steps the value stream goes through, from an idea to delivering value. The map includes handoffs, bottlenecks, and delays.
• Reviews patterns from the value stream planning boards to identify potential improvements to the organizational design of the value stream and cross-functional teams. They identify dependencies that are inhibiting flow and proactively work with stakeholders and leaders to influence the reduction or elimination of waste.
• Assists in tracking the completion of epics in the value stream backlog. Moreover, they ensure the teams use the system demo effectively as the primary measure of value delivery.
• Coordinates capacity planning across the various agile teams to ensure effective alignment of cross-functional resources; assess potential issues and report to leadership to begin problem solving, as needed.

Impediment Management (20%)

Effective impediment mitigation and the ability to resolve blockers is a critical responsibility for a Release Train Engineer between teams or functions (internal, client, and suppliers), and to observe and guide teams as needed. Release Train Engineers are expected to proactively identify potential impediments and work with the teams, and as needed with leadership, to develop comprehensive risk mitigation strategies. This role will work to facilitate resolution of blockers as they arise during execution and will communicate impacts to stakeholders.

Duties:

• Proactively identify, assess, and work cross-functionally to mitigate impediments anticipating their potential impact on the success of the initiative.
• Regularly update stakeholders on risk status and mitigation strategies, ensuring transparency and alignment with business goals.
• Maintain comprehensive risk and impediment information for all aspects of the initiative, assigning responsibilities and continually evaluating the effectiveness of mitigation efforts.
• Share across all teams the strategies, mitigations, and resolutions to help with current and future cross-functional risks.
• Recommend the approach to blockers impacting a team or multiple teams while balancing cost, resources, benefits, and capabilities.
• Maintain information on risks, resolutions, and lessons learned to inform future projects and improve impediment management practices.
• Ensure that risks are built into planning, ensuring risks are continuously evaluated and prioritized.
• Monitor and address risks in real-time during "scrum of scrums", ensuring rapid resolution and minimal disruption to progress.

Qualifications (Education, Experience, Certifications & KSA):

• 8 - 10 years in an Agile environment required.
• Bachelor's Degree required in business, technology, or related field. Master's Degree preferred.
• Experience in motivating and influencing teams cross-functional teams.
• Experienced with coaching and mentoring for continuous improvement.
• Is a servant leader empowering and encouraging team members' contributions.
• Understands and can execute the principles and techniques of organizational change.
• Proficient in resolving/negotiation conflicts within teams and key stakeholders.
• SAFe Release Train Engineer Certification, required
• Agile Certifications, required
• PMI-ACP Certification or Project Management Professional (PMP) Certification, preferred
• 4+ years of experience leading large-scale Agile transformations or serving as a Release Train Engineer, Program Manager, or equivalent.

The above statements are intended to describe the general nature and level of work being performed by people assigned to this job. They are not intended to be an exhaustive list of all responsibilities, skills, efforts or working conditions associated with a job.

We offer our employees a robust compensation package! Our comprehensive benefits include: medical, dental and vision insurance coverage; 100% company-paid life and disability coverage, 401k options with company match, three weeks PTO by the end of the first year and much more. Allied proudly promotes from within as part of a strong commitment to providing career growth opportunities for employees of all levels. Our diverse business portfolio allows employees broad career options with the advantage of staying with the same organization.

All qualified candidates will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.

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