Technical Product Owner (Banking)

Nauchsoft is an international IT consulting and software development company. We have been in the IT business for 37 years and continue growing.

Job Summary

We are seeking a Senior Technical Product Owner (TPO) to join our architecture team. This role is prospective and has been created in line with the company’s planned team expansion. The role owns the technical slice of the product backlog for distributed, integration-heavy systems platform and API teams, integrations with core and external systems, event-driven services. The TPO decides what technical work gets done and in which order: enablers, non-functional requirements, technical debt, and APIs consumed by other teams. The TPO also drives delivery of that backlog: prepares sprints for the teams, clarifies technical questions and tracks plan vs. actual for backlog and releases. The TPO works alongside the Product Owner, who keeps accountability for overall backlog priority, the Tech Lead, who owns how the work is built, and a dedicated Scrum Master, who facilitates team events and resolves conflicts. Banking and lending projects delivered within SAFe agile release trains are the current hiring priority.

Key Responsibilities

Major Activities

• Own the technical backlog: enablers, architectural runway items, non-functional requirements, technical debt, platform and API features.
• Validate and compose the backlog for each team the TPO serves; keep it refined and ready for the next sprints.
• Prepare sprints for the teams: Definition of Ready, sprint scope proposal, sprint goal; validate the scope against capacity and dependencies.
• Manage delivery of the backlog: plan vs. actual for backlog, sprints and releases; surface deviations early and agree corrective actions with the PO, Tech Lead and RTE.
• Clarify technical questions for the team during refinement and the sprint; route design questions to the architect.
• Communicate and align architecture decisions with the architect; initiate ADRs for subsequent approval by the architect and the architecture board.
• Take part in integration specifications: requirements input, clarification, review and sign-off; the System Analyst owns the detail.
• Translate architecture decisions and ADRs into backlog items with measurable acceptance criteria.
• Act as product owner for APIs consumed by other teams: API roadmap, versioning and deprecation policy, consumer onboarding. Contracts are designed by the architect or System Analyst.
• Balance business and technical capacity with the Product Owner; justify technical items by risk, cost of delay and quality attributes.
• Collect NFR input from business constraints and SLAs; turn the architect's target values (latency, throughput, availability, RPO/RTO, security controls) into backlog items with measurable acceptance criteria.
• Track and prioritize technical debt by its impact on delivery speed, incidents and compliance.
• Define acceptance criteria for technical stories and enablers, and accept them.
• Prepare enablers for PI Planning: decomposition, sizing input, dependency map.
• Coordinate cross-team technical dependencies with the RTE and other teams of the release train.
• Align the architectural runway with the Solution Architect and enterprise architecture governance.
• Plan security, CI/CD and observability work into the backlog together with InfoSec and DevOps / platform teams.
• Maintain backlog, decisions and specifications in Jira and Confluence.
• Measure and report technical health: flow metrics, defect trends, technical debt ratio, SLO compliance.
• Stakeholder Engagement and Agile Delivery Stream Support.
• Communicate technical priorities and trade-offs to both business and technical stakeholders.
• Operate within SAFe on a PI planning horizon.
• Contribute reusable artefacts: enabler templates, NFR checklists, API lifecycle guidelines.
• Mentor Product Owners and analysts on technical backlog practices.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in software engineering, systems analysis or architecture, including 2+ years as Technical Product Owner or Product Owner of a platform, API or integration product
• Senior level with client facing skills
• Banking or financial services domain experience will be a big plus
• Hands-on understanding of distributed systems: REST API design and versioning, message brokers, event-driven integration
• Backlog management: enablers and technical stories with acceptance criteria, prioritization techniques (WSJF, cost of delay)
• Delivery management: sprint preparation, release planning, plan vs. actual tracking and forecasting in Jira
• Ability to read and challenge solution architecture: monolith, modular monolith and microservices with their trade-offs
• Non-functional requirements and quality attributes, SLO / SLA definition
• Technical debt management practices
• Agile and SAFe framework and backlog management in Jira and Confluence
• English is B2+

Preferred Qualifications

• Finance or Banking Business Domain, integrations with core banking systems.
• SAFe certification.
• OpenAPI, API management platforms, contract testing.
• Awareness of Kubernetes, Kafka or RabbitMQ, CI/CD pipelines is plus as well
• Regulated domains and compliance like GDPR, PCI DSS
• Ability to run a case-based session: take a business initiative and decompose it into enablers and technical stories with acceptance criteria on the spot
• Preparing the clarification questions pack on technical scope for the client and driving it to closure.
• Decomposing technical scope into a feature and enabler list with acceptance criteria to support estimation.
• Supporting Solution Architects and engineers during estimation and optimization sessions, verifying that the estimated technical scope matches the documented requirements.
• Participating in discovery sessions and workshops with client stakeholders.

We offer:

• Opportunity for professional self-realization and growth.
• Friendly team.
• 25-days of paid vacation.
• Medical insurance and 100% payment for sick leave.
• Professional training and obtaining certificates at the company's expense.
• Foreign language courses and other corporate programs.
• A variety of corporate events.
• Bonuses in case of wedding or a child’s birth.
• The possibility of remote work from any location.