SRE Product Owner

Position Overview

We are seeking an experienced, technically fluent Product Owner to lead and grow a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team supporting BAN/LAN/WLAN Transport Site Reliability Engineering and Operations for a large-scale, geographically dispersed enterprise network. This individual will own the product backlog, manage and develop a team of 8-12 highly technical engineers, and partner closely with other Product Owners across the Transport portfolio (WAN, network boundary, NetDevOps) to align priorities, dependencies, and roadmaps.

This is not a generalist PO role. The ideal candidate has a working command of enterprise routing, switching, and wireless technologies - enough to credibly prioritize backlog items, evaluate technical trade-offs, translate engineering constraints for program leadership and customers, and hold their own in technical conversations with their engineers. This person will serve as the connective tissue between deep technical execution and program-level delivery, resourcing, and stakeholder management.

Key Responsibilities

Product Ownership & Backlog Management

• Own, prioritize, and continuously refine the product backlog for the SRE Transport (BAN/LAN/WLAN) team, balancing customer needs, technical risk, operational stability, and mission priorities.

• Translate stakeholder, customer, and program requirements into clear, well-formed features, user stories, and acceptance criteria that technical engineers can execute against without ambiguity.

• Partner with Product Owners across other Transport domains (WAN, boundary, NetDevOps, etc.) to align cross-team roadmaps, sequence dependencies, and resolve competing priorities.

• Maintain and communicate a rolling roadmap for the Transport BAN/LAN/WLAN product line, including upcoming capability investments, technical debt, and modernization efforts.

• Make and defend prioritization calls that require understanding technical dependency chains (e.g., routing/switching changes, SD-WAN rollouts, WLAN upgrades) - not just business value scoring.

Agile Delivery & Program Execution

• Serve as the Product Owner within a SAFe Agile framework: lead backlog grooming, sprint planning, story sizing, and sprint reviews.

• Facilitate or actively participate in Daily Stand-Ups (DSUs), retrospectives, Program Increment (PI) planning, and other Agile ceremonies.

• Develop and deliver PI objectives, demonstrations, and technical progress updates to program leadership and customer stakeholders.

• Track team velocity, throughput, and delivery health in ADO; proactively surface blockers, risks, and resourcing gaps.

• Support change management processes by ensuring backlog items tied to network changes, upgrades, and deployments are properly scoped, sequenced, and reflected in change tickets.

People & Resource Management

• Manage day-to-day performance, workload distribution, and career development for a team of 8-12 technical engineers.

• Conduct 1:1s, performance check-ins, and contribute to formal performance review cycles.

• Support staffing, onboarding, and ramp-up planning for new team members; identify and address skill gaps within the team.

• Coordinate on-call rotations and off-hours maintenance coverage across the team, ensuring adequate staffing for scheduled and emergency work.

• Own team-level administrative responsibilities: timesheet/labor approvals, travel and training requests, and resource forecasting for program leadership.

Technical & Stakeholder Liaison

• Act as the primary bridge between the engineering team and program leadership, customers, and other cross-functional stakeholders - translating in both directions.

• Participate in engineering, architecture, and design review meetings to represent the roadmap and ensure business/mission context informs technical decisions.

• Support Root Cause Analysis (RCA) reviews for major incidents from a program and process standpoint, ensuring remediation items are captured, prioritized, and tracked to closure in the backlog.

• Coordinate Tier III escalation visibility with program leadership, ensuring critical customer-impacting issues are communicated with appropriate urgency.

Team Technical Scope (For Context)

The engineers on this team are responsible for BAN/LAN/WLAN, network boundary engineering, routing, switching, and network security across an enterprise environment comparable to 16,000+ devices across 450+ geographically dispersed locations, including:

• Configuration, maintenance, and troubleshooting of switches, routers, VLANs, wireless access points, firewalls, and network sensors.

• Tier III escalation support and RCA for complex, multi-discipline incidents.

• Configuration baseline management, DISA STIG compliance, and pre-production lab validation.

The Product Owner is not expected to perform this hands-on engineering work, but must understand it well enough to prioritize it, staff for it, and represent it accurately to non-technical stakeholders.

Qualification s

Education & Experience

• Bachelor's degree with 8-12 years of relevant professional experience; or

• Minimum 3 years of experience as a Product Owner, Scrum Master, or technical program/project lead within a SAFe Agile framework.

• Prior experience directly managing or leading technical teams of 5+ engineers.

• Equivalent education and experience substitutions may be considered at the Hiring Manager's discretion.

Security Clearance

• Active Secret security clearance required.

Certifications

• A recognized Agile/Product Owner certification (e.g., SAFe POPM, CSPO, PMI-ACP) or willingness to obtain within 90 days of hire.

• DoD 8570.01 IAT Level II or higher certification (e.g., Security+, CASP+, CISSP) preferred; required if role involves privileged access to network management tools.

Technical & Domain Knowledge

• Working knowledge of enterprise BAN/LAN/WLAN and network boundary architecture - sufficient to read engineering designs, evaluate risk, and prioritize accordingly.

• Understanding of defense-in-depth principles and how they shape network security prioritization.

• Strong understanding of configuration management practices, change management processes, and lab validation workflows.

• Proficiency with ADO for backlog, roadmap, and reporting management.

Leadership & Communication

• Demonstrated ability to manage, mentor, and develop a team of 8-12 technical resources.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to translate deep technical detail into terms program leadership and customers can act on.

• Strong stakeholder management skills, including experience partnering with peer Product Owners to manage cross-team dependencies.

• Strong analytical, prioritization, and conflict-resolution skills.

Operational Requirements

• Ability to support occasional off-hours coordination for maintenance windows or major incidents.

• Ability to travel up to 10%.

Preferred Qualifications

• Previous experience supporting the Navy Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) network or comparable large-scale DoD network environment.

• Previous experience supporting Department of Defense (DoD) programs.

• Prior experience as a Product Owner or technical lead specifically within a network engineering, SRE, or NetOps organization.

• Working familiarity with network automation and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) concepts (e.g., Ansible, Python) sufficient to evaluate related backlog items.

• Experience partnering with multiple Product Owners across a shared technical domain (e.g., a broader Transport or Network portfolio).

• Active or prior Cisco networking certification (CCNA/CCNP) a plus, though not required for this role

NGEN

If you're looking for comfort, keep scrolling. At Leidos, we outthink, outbuild, and outpace the status quo - because the mission demands it. We're not hiring followers. We're recruiting the ones who disrupt, provoke, and refuse to fail. Step 10 is ancient history. We're already at step 30 - and moving faster than anyone else dares.

Original Posting:

For U.S. Positions: While subject to change based on business needs, Leidos reasonably anticipates that this job requisition will remain open for at least 3 days with an anticipated close date of no earlier than 3 days after the original posting date as listed above.

Pay Range:

The Leidos pay range for this job level is a general guideline only and not a guarantee of compensation or salary. Additional factors considered in extending an offer include (but are not limited to) responsibilities of the job, education, experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities, as well as internal equity, alignment with market data, applicable bargaining agreement (if any), or other law.