Technical Product Owner

What You'll Be Doing

· Translate business and compliance requirements into well-defined features, stories, and testable acceptance criteria for payments/tender flows.

· Maintain backlog ordering, readiness, and transparency for the team(s) you support; make timely scope and priority calls to keep delivery moving.

· Develop a working understanding of the payment pipeline (tender selection, authorization/capture, card tokenization, partial/split capture for marketplace orders, government benefit tender handling) sufficient to make informed tradeoffs with engineering.

· Partner with engineers/architects on discovery and refinement without dictating implementation; flag ambiguous requirements, dependency gaps, and risk early.

· Validate delivered work against acceptance criteria and intended outcome, including coordination of functional/integration testing across tender types.

· Ownership in release readiness for payments changes — understand what's shipping, confirm monitoring/rollback thinking, and support go-live communication.

· Support production issue triage for payments incidents (customer/business impact, ownership, communication) in partnership with engineering.

· Work within the team's existing SAFe Agile ceremonies (planning, standups, backlog refinement, retro).

Must-Have

· Experience as a Technical Product Owner / Product Owner on a software delivery team (Agile/SAFe), not just a business analyst or project coordinator.

· Demonstrated ability to create clear, testable acceptance criteria and break down features into right-sized stories.

· Comfortable discussing APIs, data flows, and system integrations with engineers — enough technical depth to ask the right questions and make scope tradeoffs, not necessarily hands-on coding.

· Experience owning a backlog for a service with real production usage (not just a greenfield project).

· Strong written and verbal communication — this role will need to translate between engineering and business/compliance stakeholders.

Nice-to-Have

· Nice-to-have experience as a software engineer, architect, payment subject matter expert.

· Prior experience in payments, order management, e-commerce checkout, or financial transaction systems.

· Familiarity with event-driven/workflow-orchestration systems (e.g. Temporal, Kafka, GCP).

· Exposure to PCI, tokenization, or other payment-compliance considerations.

· Experience with retail/e-commerce order flows (pickup, delivery, marketplace/3rd-party fulfillment, subscriptions).

Don't Want

· Pure business analyst or project manager background with no backlog/acceptance-criteria ownership. This is a Technical Role.

· No prior experience partnering directly with engineers on technical discovery — purely requirements-gathering and status-reporting.

· Resume emphasizes "coordinated," "scheduled," "tracked status" over "defined," "owned," "prioritized," "decided."