Product Owner - Lead

Job Description

We are seeking a highly strategic and technically adept Product Owner to define the vision, strategy, and roadmap for our core technology platform. This platform serves as the foundational layer and critical dependency for all key customer-facing and internal products within the organization. This role requires balancing the needs of internal development teams (our customers) with long-term architectural health and efficiency.

 Key Responsibilities
 
A. Platform Strategy and Vision
 
•    Define and communicate the long-term vision and strategic roadmap for the core platform, encompassing infrastructure, shared services, common frameworks, developer tools, and security standards.
•    Act as the voice of the internal customer (other Product Teams, Engineering Teams, DevOps) to understand their dependency needs, pain points, and requirements for performance, scalability, and resilience.
•    Analyze market trends in platform technology (e.g., Cloud, Kubernetes, CI/CD, Observability) to ensure the platform remains modern, cost-effective, and competitive.
•    Define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) for the platform, focusing on technical metrics like developer velocity, system reliability, security compliance, and cost efficiency.
 
B. Platform Development and Prioritization
 
•    Manage, groom, and prioritize the Platform Backlog, translating architectural epics, technical debt, and cross-cutting requirements into clear user stories with defined acceptance criteria.
•    Lead Agile ceremonies (sprint planning, backlog refinement, stand-ups, reviews) for the Platform Engineering team.
•    Balance conflicting priorities between immediate feature delivery support, critical security patches, and necessary long-term architectural investment (technical debt repayment).
•    Collaborate with the Chief Architect and Engineering Leads to ensure all platform development aligns with the overall Enterprise Architecture.
•    Accept or reject completed stories based on the Definition of Done, ensuring high standards for code quality, documentation, security, and operational readiness.
 
C. Stakeholder Management and Communication
 
•    Serve as the primary liaison between the Platform Engineering team and the consuming Product Teams.
•    Manage communication and dependencies across multiple technical teams, clearly articulating platform capabilities, upcoming changes, and migration paths.
•    Create and maintain high-quality documentation (APIs, integration guides, service catalog) to accelerate adoption and reduce cognitive load for dependent teams.
•    Conduct internal demos and training to socialize new platform features and drive adoption across the organization.

 II. Required Qualifications & Skills
 
 
A. Experience
 
•    5+ years of experience in software development, engineering management, or product ownership in a technical domain.
•    3+ years specifically serving as a Product Owner or Technical Lead for a platform, infrastructure, or shared services team.
•    Proven experience working with complex, distributed systems (Microservices, APIs) and Cloud-Native technologies (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
 
B. Technical Fluency
 
•    Strong understanding of modern DevOps practices, including CI/CD pipelines, GitOps, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and service meshes.
•    Working knowledge of core platform components such as API Gateways, identity management (OAuth/OpenID), monitoring (Observability), and container orchestration (Kubernetes/Docker).
•    Ability to read, understand, and discuss technical designs, architectural diagrams, and trade-offs with Principal Engineers.

Mandatory Competencies