Last updated: November 6, 2026
By Jennifer Burdick, Recruiting Manager, KORE1
An agile coach job description should state how many teams and leaders the coach will work with, which framework and tools are in place, what the coach may change without permission, how the engagement ends, and a closed pay range.
In 2026 that range runs from about $96,500 for a coach working with two to four teams to $200,000 and above for someone leading the whole change. Most postings skip four of those five items and spend the space on certifications.
Agile coaching searches are a small but stubborn part of my desk at KORE1, and the postings that come with them tend to fail in one particular way. The agile coach staffing team I work with sees maybe three of these drafts a month. Almost every one of them describes a person. Very few describe a seat. That gap is expensive.
Here is the one that taught me to look for it. A government services contractor in Chantilly, Virginia, roughly 1,400 people, posted for an agile coach in the fall of 2025. SAFe 6.0 SPC required. ICP-ACC preferred. Eight years of experience. “Drive enterprise agile transformation.” They found a coach with every line on the list. They hired her at $168,000 base. Good hire, on paper.
In her second week she learned that moving one developer from one team to another took a change request to the program management office, and that any edit to a Jira workflow went into a tools-team queue that was running about six weeks behind. She could recommend things. She could not change anything. It did not improve. She resigned in month five, and the eleven teams she had been brought in to coach were holding the same ceremonies in March that they had held in October.
Nobody lied to her. Nobody had to. The posting simply never said what she would be allowed to touch. Not once.
Since I am the one telling you how to write this, you should know how KORE1 gets paid. Our revenue comes from placement fees, paid when a client hires a person we sent. Keep that in mind. Nothing on this page needs us, and a clear posting sometimes means a client fills the seat on their own, which is fine with me.
Where the Coach Sits Between the Teams and the Executives
An agile coach works with several teams, and with the leaders above them, to improve how they plan, prioritize, and deliver work. A scrum master serves one team. The coach moves between teams and spends real time with executives, and the job is finished when the organization runs those practices without needing the coach in the room.
That last clause is the part a posting almost never mentions, and it changes who applies. Coaches who have done this well for a decade are, by temperament, people who want to leave. Give them a job that sounds permanent and vague and many of them will not bother. They have options.
A few things this page leaves to its neighbors. The question of whether your problem calls for a coach in the first place, plus the interview loop and the first ninety days, belongs to our hiring guide for agile coaches. Scope tiers and every pay figure come from the agile coach salary guide. If the seat really serves one team, use the scrum master job description template instead and save the difference. What follows is about the five lines only a coach posting needs. The questions to ask once applications arrive are in our list of questions to ask agile coach candidates.
Decide, Propose, or Advise
Coaches have influence. Formal authority, almost none. That is normal. The trouble starts when nobody writes down where the influence stops, because the candidate fills the gap with whatever their last company allowed. Sort the common decisions before you post.
| Decision | Who usually owns it | Sentence for the posting |
|---|---|---|
| Ceremony format and length | Each team, with its scrum master | “You may change how our retrospectives and planning sessions run, with the team’s agreement.” |
| Which people sit on which team | Engineering managers | “You will propose team changes to the director of engineering, who decides within two weeks.” |
| Jira or Azure Boards workflow, fields, and statuses | A tools or platform team | “You will have project admin rights in Jira” or “Workflow changes go through our Atlassian admin, currently about a two-week turnaround.” |
| Definition of done | Teams, sometimes with QA leadership | “You will help each team write one, and we expect them to differ.” |
| Planning calendar, PI length, release dates | Program or portfolio leadership | “Our quarterly planning dates are fixed through [month]. After that, you own the proposal.” |
| How work gets funded | Finance and the executive sponsor | “Funding stays project-based this fiscal year. You will advise on next year’s model.” |
| Metrics reported to executives | Often whoever built the dashboard | “You will choose what we report upward, and velocity will not be on it.” |
Not every row needs to be generous. Honesty matters more. A seat where the coach advises on six of seven items can still be a good job, and some excellent coaches prefer it. They just want to know before they accept. The Chantilly coach would have been fine with “propose” on team assignments. Six weeks for a workflow edit with no way around it was what she could not work with, and one sentence would have let her decline in the first phone call instead of in month five.
Print the Load Instead of the Years
Eight years of experience is the line every posting has and nobody can use. Replace it with the load.
Start with teams.
How many teams? How many scrum masters will this person coach, and are any of them new to the role? Which executives will the coach meet with every week, by title, and does at least one of them actually want to be there? Our salary guide splits the market into four scopes, from team-level coaches working with two to four teams through transformation leads who own the whole change, and the team count you print is the fastest way to tell a candidate which of those four jobs this is. A program coach reading “nine teams, two release trains, one VP who has asked for this and one who has not” knows within seconds whether it is her kind of work.
Then the split. Most coaching weeks divide between time with teams and time with leaders, and the ratio swings hard by tier. Write it as a percentage. Seventy-thirty toward teams describes a very different person from thirty-seventy.
Framework Versions Stopped Being a Safe Requirement
“SAFe 6.0 certification required” appears in a large share of the coach postings I read. It is already out of date. In a March 2026 courseware FAQ, Scaled Agile says the framework has transitioned away from using version numbers and that courses are now identified by release date, with the current Leading SAFe courseware labeled 2026.03. The same update added exam topics on AI-empowered SAFe, writing AI prompts, and responsible AI.
None of that makes SAFe certification less useful as a screen. It does mean the requirement should name the configuration you actually run, Essential, Large Solution, Portfolio, or Full, and the credential you want, such as SPC, rather than a version that no longer exists.
Scrum shops have their own update. It is newer. In 2025 Jeff Sutherland, John Coleman, and Ralph Jocham published the Scrum Guide Expansion Pack, a companion to the 2020 Scrum Guide with eleven expansion documents, including ones on multi-team Scrum and on AI and Scrum. A coach working in a Scrum organization of more than three or four teams should have read it, and asking about it in the screening call takes thirty seconds.
Tools sit right next to the framework in a good posting, and in 2026 they carry a deadline. Atlassian stopped selling new Data Center subscriptions to new customers on March 30, 2026, and its Data Center end-of-life page sets March 28, 2029 as the date affected products go read-only. Existing customers can keep buying subscriptions and expansions until March 30, 2028. Jira Align is not included.
That matters to a coach more than it seems to. An electric cooperative’s IT group in Albuquerque, about thirty teams on Jira Data Center with something like 140 custom workflows built up since 2017, hired a program-level coach early this year. Nobody mentioned that the move to Jira Cloud was scheduled for the same twelve months. By April she was spending two days a week in workflow mapping sessions with the Atlassian admin, collapsing those 140 workflows into a handful the teams could live with. It was valuable work. Somebody had to do it. It was also not the work she had been hired or budgeted for, and the coaching plan slipped a full quarter.
If a migration is coming, put it in the posting. Plenty of coaches like that kind of work. Some will refuse it.
Washington, D.C., Wants a Range and an Answer About Health Insurance
Each of our job description templates walks through one jurisdiction’s pay-transparency rules. For an agile coach the District of Columbia is the natural one, since so much coaching work sits with federal contractors and agencies within a few Metro stops of each other.
The District’s rule is short. Under D.C. Code § 32-1453.01, an employer must put the minimum and maximum projected salary or hourly pay in all job listings and position descriptions advertised, and the range has to run from the lowest to the highest pay the employer in good faith believes it would pay at the time of posting. It must also disclose the existence of healthcare benefits to prospective employees before the first interview.
Two parts of that catch coach postings in particular.
The statute names promotions and transfers alongside new jobs. Coach seats are often filled from inside, by promoting a strong scrum master, and a professional association in the NoMa neighborhood did exactly that last year with an intranet post that carried no range, on the theory that an internal opening did not count. The text does not support that theory. If the seat is in the District, the internal posting needs a range too.
The second is the top of the band. Our own salary guide describes the transformation lead tier as $200,000 and up, which is an honest way to describe a market and is not a maximum. A posting needs a number at both ends.
| Scope | Base range (KORE1 salary guide) | Contract bill rate | What to print |
|---|---|---|---|
| Team-level coach | $96,500 to $120,000 | $85 to $105/hr, often part time | The band as written, plus the team count |
| Program coach | $120,000 to $155,000 | $105 to $125/hr | The band, plus the release train or product line |
| Enterprise coach | $155,000 to $200,000 | $125 to $145/hr | The band, plus which business units |
| Transformation lead | $200,000 and up | Usually priced per engagement | A real ceiling you would pay, never “and up” |
The healthcare line is the easier one to forget. People do. It does not have to sit in the ad itself, but it has to reach the candidate before the first interview, so the simplest fix is a short benefits paragraph in the posting, which saves an extra email. For a contract seat placed through an agency, say who provides the coverage. Candidates ask. In the District they are entitled to an answer before they sit down with you. A seat that is mostly remote, or anything else unusual, is a question for employment counsel. Our salary benchmark assistant compares a band with live postings, if you want a check before yours goes up.
Say How the Engagement Ends
A coach seat with no end condition reads as one of two things. Either a permanent process role with “coach” in the title, or a company that has not decided what success looks like. Both scare off the people you want.
One sentence fixes it. Really, one. For a contract seat, name the milestone, such as “This engagement ends after our second quarterly planning event runs without outside facilitation, which we expect around [month].” For a permanent seat, describe the handoff the role is built around. “Within a year, three of our scrum masters will be running cross-team planning themselves, and you will coach them to it.” The engagement model itself, contract against direct hire, is covered in the hiring guide. The posting only has to say which one you picked and what finished looks like.
Agile Coach Job Description Template
Everything below is meant to be copied. Any bracket beginning with “Hiring manager only” are notes for the person writing the draft. Remove them before anyone outside the hiring team sees it. Most of the rest can be answered from your team roster, the planning calendar, and a fifteen-minute conversation with the executive sponsor.
Job Title
[Agile Coach, Two Product Teams / Program Agile Coach, Claims Release Train / Enterprise Agile Coach, Finance and Operations Technology / Agile Transformation Lead] [Hiring manager only: Put the scope in the title. “Agile Coach” by itself pulls every scrum master who wants a raise and hides the job from the people who would fit it.]
Where Our Teams Are Today
[Company] has [number] delivery teams, about [number] people, working in [Scrum / Kanban / SAFe, [configuration] / our own model]. Planning runs on a [two-week / quarterly / ten-week PI] cadence. The honest version of where we are is [one or two sentences, for example “our teams run good sprints, but three of them share a release calendar and nobody owns the dependencies between them”]. [Executive sponsor title] asked for this role, and you will meet with them every [week / two weeks].
Who You Will Coach
- [Number] teams, including [number] scrum masters, [number] of whom are in their first year in the role.
- [Titles of the leaders you will coach directly, for example “the VP of engineering and the head of product operations”].
- A rough split of [70/30 / 50/50 / 30/70] between time with teams and time with leaders.
What You Can Change on Day One
- You may change [ceremony formats / team working agreements / the retrospective calendar] with the team’s agreement.
- You will propose [team structure changes / planning calendar changes] to [title], who decides within [time].
- You will advise on [funding model / portfolio intake / reporting], which stay with [owner] this year.
- [You have project admin rights in [Jira / Azure Boards] / Workflow changes go through [team], with a turnaround of about [time]].
Framework and Tools
We use [Jira Cloud / Jira Data Center / Azure Boards / Rally / Jira Align] for planning and tracking. [We move from Jira Data Center to Cloud in [quarter, year], and you will help redesign team workflows as part of it / No tool changes are planned this year.] [Hiring manager only: Name the SAFe configuration rather than a version number, since Scaled Agile no longer numbers its releases.]
What Finished Looks Like
[For contract: This engagement ends when [milestone], which we expect around [month, year]. / For a permanent seat: Within [twelve] months, [who] will run [what] without you in the room, and you will spend the following year on [next scope].] We will judge progress by [two or three measures, for example cycle time from start to done, how many planned quarterly objectives actually shipped, and how many cross-team dependencies are found in the first week of planning rather than the last].
Background That Fits
- You have coached at least [number] teams through [the change we need, in a sentence], and you can tell us about one that did not go well.
- You have worked directly with [executive level] leaders who were not yet convinced.
- [SPC / ICP-ACC / ICF coaching credential] [required because our procurement team screens for it / preferred / not required].
- [Optional: experience with a Jira Data Center to Cloud migration, or another tool consolidation].
Pay, Healthcare, and Location
[$[minimum] to $[maximum]] base [or $[minimum] to $[maximum] per hour for contract], plus [bonus, if any]. [Healthcare coverage summary, for example “medical, dental, and vision, with the company paying [percent] of the employee premium”] [or, for contract seats, “health coverage is offered through [agency or employer of record]”]. [Remote / hybrid with [days] office days in [city] / at our [city] office], and the role reports to [title]. [Hiring manager only: In the District of Columbia, print a real minimum and maximum, including on internal promotion postings, and make sure the healthcare summary reaches every candidate before a first interview.]
Objections From the Transformation Office
Our coach will be a contractor through an agency. Who handles the pay range?
Whoever publishes the listing, in our experience, and for a contract seat that range is usually hourly, such as $105 to $125 an hour for a program coach.
The District’s statute does not define “job listing,” so the client and the agency should agree in writing on who posts what. When we post a D.C. contract seat, we print the hourly range and say who provides health coverage. Your counsel gets the final word.
Can one posting cover a team-level coach and an enterprise coach?
Not well. The midpoints of the two bands sit about $70,000 apart, and the two jobs attract different people, so a combined posting tends to draw the junior half and lose the senior half.
Pick one. Pick the scope first. Then post. If you truly have both seats open, write two postings, each with its own range.
We run plain Scrum. Should SAFe appear in the posting at all?
Probably not. Leave it out unless you plan to adopt it, because SAFe on a Scrum posting attracts candidates who will try to install it.
How much should we say about the Jira migration?
Enough for a candidate to estimate the hours. No more. The migration date, the rough number of custom workflows, and whether the coach is expected in the mapping sessions are the three facts that matter.
Coaches who have done a consolidation before will read those three facts and know what they are walking into, and a few will apply because of them. Coaches who have not will at least stop being surprised in April.
Is a “healthcare benefits” line really necessary outside D.C.?
Legally, only where a law requires it, but it costs one sentence and answers the first question many candidates would otherwise ask the recruiter.
Contract coaches in particular want to know whether coverage comes through the agency, an employer of record, or nobody. Telling them early filters out a surprising number of dead-end conversations.
The sponsor wants “drive transformation” in the first paragraph. Is that so bad?
Bad enough to rewrite, since every agile coach posting says it and it tells a candidate nothing about your company. Replace it with the one-sentence version of what is broken.
“Three teams share a release calendar and nobody owns the dependencies” is a sentence a good coach can answer. “Drive transformation” is a sentence a good coach scrolls past.
Write Down What the Coach May Change
The Chantilly contractor posted the seat again this spring. The second version led with the team count, eleven, and a short list of what the coach could change without a ticket, which turned out to be ceremonies, working agreements, and Jira board configuration on the coached teams’ own projects. Applicants dropped from about 160 to 40. That was the point. The coach they hired asked about the tools-team queue in her first interview, because the posting had told her it existed.
None of this is new information. Most of what a strong coach needs to see is already sitting in your org chart and your planning calendar. Write it down. All of it. If you would like a coach’s-eye read before the posting goes live, send the draft to our agile recruiting team and we will mark the lines a strong candidate would stop on. Our one-year retention figure, which is the number I would ask any agency for first, sits at 92 percent.
