Technical Product Owner

About the Role

We’re looking for a hands-on, highly technical Product Owner who can operate at the intersection of engineering, product strategy, and delivery. This is not a “requirements gatherer” or backlog secretary role. You will work daily with engineers, understand system constraints, make hard trade-offs, and translate business goals into clear, technically sound product decisions. Prepare to read logs, review API specs, and argue about performance vs. scope.

Product Ownership & Delivery

• Own and prioritize the product backlog with a deep understanding of technical dependencies and risks
• Write clear user stories with acceptance criteria engineers actually trust
• Make scope and sequencing decisions based on technical complexity, risk, and value
• Actively participate in sprint planning, backlog refinement, reviews, and retrospectives
• Prepare product roadmaps in Figma, plan sprints, and write user stories

Technical Collaboration

• Partner closely with engineering to:
• Understand architecture, constraints, and trade-offs
• Evaluate implementation options (not dictate solutions)
• Identify and reduce technical risk early
• Review and understand:
• API contracts
• Data models
• System diagrams
• Non-functional requirements (performance, security, reliability)

Stakeholder Management

• Translate business goals into technically feasible plans
• Push back on unrealistic timelines or scope with evidence
• Communicate trade-offs clearly to non-technical stakeholders
• Align roadmap priorities with engineering capacity and system health

Product Quality & Sustainability

• Champion:
• Backward compatibility
• Operational readiness
• Observability and supportability
• Balance feature delivery with:
• Technical debt
• Refactoring
• Platform improvements

Required Experience

• 7+ years working on software products in a technical environment
• Proven experience as a Product Owner / Technical Product Manager for engineering-led teams
• Strong understanding of:
• Web APIs (REST, async workflows, error handling)
• Databases and data modeling
• Distributed systems basics (latency, retries, partial failure)
• Comfortable reading:
• API specs
• Architecture diagrams
• Logs and metrics
• Experience working in Agile / Scrum environments with real delivery accountability