Senior Agile Coach

We’re looking for a Senior Agile Coach to help our Technology, Product and Data squads become more effective as Our Future Health continues to grow. 

This is an opportunity to work across multiple cross-functional squads, helping improve how we build products, develop software, collaborate, make decisions and deliver value. 

Our Future Health is an ambitious collaboration between the public, charity and private sectors, designed to help people live healthier lives for longer through better prevention, earlier detection and improved treatment of diseases. We will speed up the discovery of new methods of early disease detection, and the evaluation of new diagnostic tools, to help identify and treat diseases early, when outcomes are usually better. With over 2.7M volunteers across the UK, we’re now the world’s biggest health research programme of its kind, and our volunteer group is also more diverse than other, similar health research programmes. 

Technology and data are central to our mission. Our systems power websites, clinics across the UK, secure analytics and research environments, and pipelines processing highly sensitive health and genetic data. As we continue to grow, we want to strengthen how our teams work together and build lasting capability across our Technology, Product and Data organisation. 

What you’ll be doing 

This isn’t a traditional Agile transformation role. We’re not looking for somebody to arrive with a framework or playbook and roll it out across the organisation. 

Instead, you’ll work alongside squads and leaders to understand how teams operate today, identify opportunities for improvement and help make practical, sustainable changes. 

You’ll work across a small number of squads at a time, spending enough time with each to make a meaningful difference before moving to where you can have the greatest impact next. 

Depending on the situation, you’ll: 

• Coach, mentor and teach squads, leaders and individuals. 
• Help improve cross-functional collaboration between Product, Engineering, Data, Science and other disciplines. 
• Help teams improve flow, reducing batch sizes, slicing work more effectively and shortening lead times. 
• Support squads in becoming more outcome-focused and self-organising. 
• Facilitate workshops, retrospectives and difficult conversations that help teams make progress. 
• Use qualitative and quantitative evidence to identify improvement opportunities and understand whether changes are working. 
• Improve interactions between squads and other teams, reducing friction and organisational bottlenecks. 
• Develop training, tools and practical approaches that can help multiple teams improve. 
• Support the formation of new squads and help improve onboarding across Technology, Product and Data. 

A key part of the role is knowing which approach to use when. Sometimes that means coaching someone to work through a problem themselves. Sometimes it means teaching a new practice. And sometimes it means drawing on your own experience and saying, “Here’s what I’d recommend and why.” 

Ultimately, success means helping teams become more capable of improving without relying on you. 

Requirements

You’ll bring strong coaching skills alongside substantial practical experience of modern product and technology organisations. 

We’d particularly like to see: 

• Experience helping multiple cross-functional product, technology or data teams become more effective. 
• Experience working in high-performing product and engineering environments, giving you a strong sense of what good can look like. 
• A broad understanding of modern product development, software engineering and delivery practices. 
• Experience improving outcomes such as flow, collaboration, quality, customer value or organisational capability. 
• The ability to coach and influence everyone from individual contributors to senior leaders. 
• Confidence moving between coaching, mentoring, teaching, facilitation and direct advice. 
• Experience using evidence and data to understand problems and measure whether improvements are making a difference. 
• Strong judgement and pragmatism, knowing when to adapt to organisational constraints and when they genuinely need challenging. 
• Comfortable operating in regulated, governed, constrained or more traditional environments. 

You may have previously worked as an Agile Coach, Product Coach, Engineering Coach or Agility Lead, or developed this experience through another route such as Engineering, Product, Delivery or Engineering Management. 

What matters most is that you bring real-world experience, a strong point of view and the judgement to adapt your approach to the situation. 

We’re not looking for someone focused on rolling out Agile frameworks, ceremonies or certifications. Experience with approaches such as Scrum, Kanban, XP, DevOps or continuous delivery can all be useful, but we expect you to treat practices as tools rather than goals in themselves. 

Similarly, experience with scaled Agile frameworks isn’t automatically a problem, but we’re not looking for somebody who wants to introduce or advocate for a scaling framework such as SAFe. 

Why join us? 

You’ll be joining at an important point in the growth of our Technology, Product and Data organisation. 

There is significant scope to make an impact, and you’ll have genuine autonomy to understand where the biggest opportunities are rather than being handed a predefined transformation roadmap. 

You’ll also be working in an unusually interesting environment. Our squads bring together people from technology, product, data, science and academic backgrounds, all working towards the same mission but often bringing very different experiences and expectations about how teams should operate. 

At the same time, we’re a highly governed and security-conscious organisation handling sensitive health data, so some of the constraints we work within exist for very good reasons. 

We’re looking for somebody who finds that combination interesting, someone pragmatic, curious and comfortable improving an organisation from where it is today, rather than pursuing an idealised version of Agile. 

This is a long-term investment in continuous improvement, not a time-limited transformation programme. The opportunity is to leave teams, leaders and the wider organisation stronger and more capable because you were here. 

Hiring process 

We feel hiring should be transparent and give you a real sense for what Our Future Health is like. Here's what you can expect: 

• Initial chat with our Talent team (30 min) to get to know each other, discuss the role and answer any questions you have. 
• 1st interview with our Director of Technology Agility (30 min) – an opportunity to learn more about each other and align on role expectations. 
• Role-based interview and coaching exercise (90 min) – around 60 minutes discussing your experience and approach, followed by a 30 min practical mock coaching conversation based on a reali