Scrum Master / Product Owner

This role is contingent upon a contract award.

ICF is seeking a Scrum Master / Product Owner to manage the delivery lifecycle of digital IT capabilities for a federal technology program. Reporting to engineering leadership, this role owns sprint execution, backlog management, and release governance across the product delivery team. It is the connective tissue between engineering, security, enterprise architecture, and client stakeholders, ensuring that work is properly scoped, approved, and shipped on schedule.

The ideal candidate has run Agile delivery in a federal IT environment and understands how to operate within government approval workflows without losing delivery momentum. This role requires equal comfort with Scrum facilitation and product ownership. The right candidate keeps the team moving, holds quality standards, and manages client-facing governance without adding bureaucratic drag.

Job Location: This is a remote-friendly position with occasional onsite requirements in the Washington, DC Metro area.

This position requires that the job be performed in the United States. If you accept this position, you should note that ICF does monitor employee work locations and blocks access from foreign locations/foreign IP addresses and also prohibits personal VPN connections.

What You'll Be Doing

• Facilitate all Agile/Scrum ceremonies, including sprint planning, daily standups, sprint reviews, and retrospectives, keeping the team focused, accountable, and continuously improving.

• Own the product backlog, including story creation, refinement, prioritization, and acceptance criteria definition. Ensure the backlog reflects current client priorities and is ready for sprint intake at all times.

• Manage the CIO and COR approval workflow, ensuring that business cases, project plans, governance mechanisms, and stakeholder commitments are in place before development work begins on any new capability.

• Govern the release process, including coordinating deployments, drafting release notes, preparing release notifications, and ensuring that all parties have the information needed to support go-live activities.

• Track and report on sprint delivery metrics and defect KPIs, using performance data to identify delivery risks, quality trends, and opportunities for process improvement.

• Coordinate with cybersecurity, data, and enterprise architecture teams to ensure that application designs, integrations, and workflows meet security and architecture standards before development begins.

• Support planning and execution of unit, integration, regression, and user acceptance testing, working with engineers to ensure adequate test coverage before release.

• Identify and escalate technical debt, performance issues, and process gaps. Work with engineering leads to incorporate remediation into the backlog and delivery planning.

• Prepare and deliver sprint reports, demo presentations, and stakeholder updates that communicate progress, risks, and decisions clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.

• Develop and maintain user-facing guides, training materials, and product documentation to support onboarding and ongoing operations.

Minimum Requirements

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent

• 5+ years of experience in product management, Scrum delivery, or Agile program management in IT environments

• 3+ years supporting federal IT programs, including experience navigating government approval and governance workflows

• Active Certified Scrum Master (CSM), Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), or equivalent Agile certification

• 2+ years working within DevSecOps delivery environments, including CI/CD pipelines and secure coding practices

• U.S. Citizenship required due to federal contract requirements

• Ability to obtain and maintain a Public Trust background investigation

• Candidate must reside in the US, be authorized to work in the US, and work must be performed in the US

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting federal IT programs in HHS, NIH, FDA, or other health-focused agencies

• Familiarity with federal IT governance requirements, including CIO and COR approval workflows for digital product development

• Experience with ITSM platforms and Agile tooling such as Jira, ServiceNow, or Azure DevOps

• SAFe certification or experience delivering within a scaled Agile framework

• Familiarity with NIST 800-53, FedRAMP, or Zero Trust architecture requirements as they relate to product delivery

At ICF, we are committed to ensuring a fair interview process for all candidates based on their own skills and knowledge. As part of this commitment, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools to generate or assist with responses during interviews (whether in-person or virtual) is not permitted. This policy is in place to maintain the integrity and authenticity of the interview process.

However, we understand that some candidates may require accommodation that involves the use of AI. If such an accommodation is needed, candidates are instructed to contact us in advance at [email protected]. We are dedicated to providing the necessary support to ensure that all candidates have an equal opportunity to succeed.