Data Scrum Master

About Canal Insurance

Canal Insurance Company specializes in insurance for commercial trucking and specialty transportation operations. Canal was founded in 1939 and is located in Greenville, South Carolina. At Canal, we recognize that our success would not be possible without the hard work and dedication of our employees. We know that happiness and productivity go hand in hand, and to that end, we consciously cultivate a culture that enables us to recruit and retain the very best talent in the business. 

Data Scrum Master

Job Summary:  

We are seeking a highly skilled and experienced Data Scrum Master to join our dynamic team. The ideal candidate will have a strong background in data management, including Data Engineering, ETL, DBA, Data Warehousing, and Reporting. As a Data Scrum Master, you will play a crucial role in ensuring the successful delivery of data projects by facilitating agile practices and fostering a collaborative team. This position will report to the Director, Enterprise Project Management.  

Key Responsibilities: 

Agile Facilitation & Coaching 

• Plan and facilitate all Scrum events: Sprint Planning, Daily Standups, Backlog Refinement, Sprint Reviews, Retrospectives, and Release Planning. 

• Coach team members and stakeholders on agile values, principles, and practices to cultivate a self organizing, high performing squad. 

• Champion incremental, testable delivery of data pipelines, models, and BI products. 

 

Delivery & Execution 

• Partner with Product Owner and Data Architects to translate epics into groomed user stories covering ETL, data modeling, DBA tasks, and reporting deliverables. 

• Track velocity, burndown, and throughput in Azure DevOps/Jira. Analyze trends and drive actions that improve predictability and quality. 

• Proactively identify and remove blockers (e.g., data quality issues, environment constraints, crossteam dependencies). 

• Coordinate production releases, ensuring alignment with change management and data governance gates. 

 

Data Pipeline & Quality Stewardship 

• Champion best practices for data quality, lineage, and governance; automate validation checks and enforce CI/CD for SQL/dbt code. 

• Collaborate with DBAs to schedule maintenance and upgrades without impacting delivery. 

• Support monitoring of batch and streaming jobs; facilitate incident postmortems and rootcause analysis. 

 

Stakeholder & Dependency Management 

• Serve as conduit between business analytics teams (Underwriting, Claims, Finance), Data Platform engineering, and external vendors. 

• Represent the squad in ScrumofScrums and PI planning to synchronize dependencies with application, integration, and cloud teams. 

 

Reporting & Transparency 

• Produce concise sprint and release dashboards for leadership, highlighting progress against OKRs, capacity, risks, and budget. 

• Drive a data driven culture of inspection, adaptation, and celebration of wins. 

 

Required Qualifications 

• Experience: 5+ years of IT delivery with 3+ as dedicated Scrum Master for data/analytics teams. 

• Technical Background: Demonstrated expertise with modern data platforms (e.g., Snowflake, Azure Synapse, SQL Server), ETL/ELT tools (e.g., SSIS, Informatica), and BI tools (Power BI, Cognos). 

• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure (Azure, AWS) 

• Foundational Knowledge: Solid SQL skills and understanding of data warehousing, dimensional modeling, and pipeline orchestration. 

• Tool Proficiency: Hands on experience configuring boards and dashboards in Azure DevOps or Jira. 

• Excellent organizational skills and ability to function in a fast paced, highly visible, and changing environment 

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills with the ability to clearly present ideas to a variety of technical and non-technical audiences 

• Proven experience as a Scrum Master, preferably in a data-focused environment. 

• Exposure to SAFe, Kanban, and DataOps / DevSecOps pipelines. 

• Ability to work collaboratively with cross-functional teams. 

• Knowledge of data governance and data quality best practices. 

 

Education/Training Requirements:  

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Data Analytics, or related field. 
• Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), Professional Scrum Master (PSM I), or equivalent. 

 

Special Considerations 

Physical Requirements: Constant use of vision, hearing, and communication (oral and written in person and via telephone).  Frequent concentration, standing, walking, handling, reaching, and grasping.  Occasional bending, kneeling and lifting (up to 25 lbs.).  Heavy use of computer and office equipment. 

Additional Requirements:  Occasional travel may be required.  Periodic work outside of standard business hours or on weekends may be required.