Product Owner

Company Profile

CloudMargin is an award winning, growth-stage FinTech company offering an innovative Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) service. We are rapidly challenging the way financial and corporate institutions manage the collateral and risk associated with derivatives trading. We believe in offering our community an affordable, easy to deploy and scalable service. 
Backed by professional investment and corporate investors, our global team works closely across product, technology and sales disciplines. Our flat structure and ethos of openness and communication means you’ll be engaged with everyone in the business and have the senior leadership team as one of your key stakeholders.

 
Primary Purpose of Role

CloudMargin's Platform team owns the cloud infrastructure our product runs on, and serves everyone across the business who depends on it, from the engineers building on it to the client-facing and operational teams whose work runs through it. The primary purpose of this role is to own that team's backlog, where three kinds of demand compete for the same capacity: enabling other teams to move quickly, keeping the estate secure, current and observable, and controlling what it costs to run. Almost none of this work is visible to clients, and all of it is felt by them. The role is accountable for making those trade-offs deliberately and defensibly, rather than letting the loudest request win. This entails:

• Understanding Demand:Gathering needs from wherever they arise. Those include the engineering teams building on the platform, the business functions that depend on it, security and compliance obligations, and the infrastructure telemetry and cost data that raise no request at all. Turning all of it into a prioritised and well-understood backlog.

• Shaping the Roadmap:Working with the Lead Site Reliability Engineer to sequence strategic initiatives, from rapid client environment provisioning to migrations onto managed services, against the maintenance and remediation the estate needs.

Making Platform Value Legible: Articulating what infrastructure investment buys, whether onboarding speed, engineering throughput, security posture or run cost, so that platform work is understood, funded and adopted.

Core Accountabilities

•    Platform Roadmap: Working with the Lead Site Reliability Engineer, shape and communicate a platform roadmap that balances strategic capability, operational health and cost, and stands up against company objectives.
•    Backlog & Delivery: Create well-defined stories for infrastructure, tooling and migration work with testable acceptance criteria, prioritise them within the team backlog, and lead the agile ceremonies that deliver them.
•    Support Process & Capacity: Own how the team's sprint support rotation works, from how requests arrive to how they are triaged, escalated and handled consistently. Reserve realistic capacity for it each sprint, and track what recurs across rotations so that repeat requests become roadmap items rather than permanent manual work.
•    Platform Health: Ensure that patching, upgrades, vulnerability remediation, observability improvements and migrations off self-managed components are planned, funded and finished, rather than deferred behind more visible work.
•    Cost of the Estate: Treat AWS spend as a tracked product metric. Work with engineering and Finance to understand where cost is going, and prioritise the changes that reduce it without compromising reliability.
•    Adoption: Make sure the capability the team builds is genuinely used. Self-service provisioning, developer environments and new tooling count as delivered when the teams they were built for have moved onto them, not when they ship.
•    Risk & Change Communication: Identify delivery and operational risks, including cross-team dependencies, and devise strategies to mitigate them. Communicate planned change, maintenance windows and deprecations to everyone affected.

Experience

Essential

•    Minimum of 3 years as a Product Owner or Technical Product Owner, including meaningful time owning an infrastructure, cloud, DevOps or internal platform backlog.
•    Enough technical depth in cloud infrastructure to prioritise independently: able to judge effort, risk and sequencing, and to challenge an approach, without needing the work translated first. Our estate is AWS managed with Terraform, though comparable experience elsewhere is equally welcome. This is not a hands-on engineering role.
•    Proven experience owning a backlog where a meaningful and unpredictable share of capacity goes to unplanned work, and keeping planned delivery moving regardless.
•    Experience delivering migrations, upgrades or decommissioning programmes where the value is reduced risk, cost or operational burden rather than a new customer-facing feature.
•    Familiarity with Agile methodologies and a commitment to best practices.

Desirable

•    Evidence of turning repetitive manual work into automation or self-service capability that teams genuinely adopted.
•    Exposure to cloud cost management (FinOps): tagging and allocation, rightsizing, scheduling, reserved capacity or savings plans.
•    Experience in a regulated environment such as FinTech or financial services. Capital Markets experience is welcome, but not required.

Skills 

•  Technical Credibility: Earns the trust of engineers by engaging with the substance of the work, and knows where their own judgement ends and the team's expertise begins.
•    Organisation & Detail: Maintains a high level of organisation at a personal and team level, keeping on top of date-sensitive events such as certificate rotations to ensure that they are understood and executed.
•    Managing Complexity: Supports the team in managing cross-team initiatives which have high technical complexity, require coordination with multiple stakeholders, and where time and discussion need to be focused effectively.
•    Prioritisation & Trade-offs: Can decide what matters most when several teams are pushing in different directions, hold that line under pressure, and explain the reasoning to the people who did not get what they asked for.
•   Communication: Excellent verbal and written communication skills. Can make the case, with evidence, for work whose value is risk, cost or effort avoided rather than something visible, for audiences up to and including the senior leadership team.
•    AI Fluency: Uses AI tooling to work faster and more independently, whether drafting and sharpening acceptance criteria, analysing telemetry, cost and support data for patterns, or researching options ahead of a decision. Knows what has to be verified before it reaches an engineer, and treats generated output as a draft rather than an answer.
•   Influence: Treats internal teams as customers rather than a captive audience. Sets expectations honestly and drives adoption by making the supported path the easiest one.
•    Resilience: Can handle pressure and setbacks, always focusing on solutions.
•    Teamwork Ethos: Puts the team above the individual, fostering collaboration and mutual respect within the team.

Education / Professional Qualifications

Relevant Product Owner qualification is strongly desirable

Compensation & Benefits

Competitive base salary

Leave entitlement

• 25 days paid leave per year plus all Public Holidays

Flexibility

• We operate a hybrid-remote approach to work which includes at least two days per week in the office.
• 45 working days Work From Anywhere (WFA) policy

Learning and development

• £1,000 per year

Family

• 6 weeks paternity pay
• Enhanced maternity pay 20 weeks full pay, 6 weeks half pay

Wellbeing

• Pension
• Life insurance
• 2x Wellness Days per year (no questions asked!)

Health

• Private healthcare
• Perkbox
• Cycle to Work

Equal Opportunities

CloudMargin is committed to equal opportunities in employment and to a working environment free from discrimination, bullying, harassment and victimisation. We welcome applications from all backgrounds and will make reasonable adjustments throughout the recruitment process on request - just let the Recruiting Team know your requirements. 

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