Technical Product Owner, Enterprise Search & AI

3M•Austin, TX

19h•Onsite

About The Position

The Technical Product Owner for Enterprise Search & AI serves as the operational bridge between strategic platform roadmaps and technical sprint execution for 3M’s enterprise search ecosystem. This individual contributor works within a cross-functional pod, translating business needs into technical requirements and prioritizing the day-to-day backlog to deliver scalable, high-performance search capabilities for digital commerce, content discovery, and emerging AI applications. The role supports the evolution of search and AI capabilities, including hybrid lexical and semantic/vector retrieval, RAG pipelines, LLM grounding, and agentic AI use cases. It coordinates with engineering, vendors, program/project managers, and business stakeholders on execution, quality, releases, adoption, and business value. The position is based at 3M Center in Maplewood, Minnesota, or a 3M facility in Austin, Texas. It follows an on-site working model, requiring work at one of those locations at least four days per week. Travel may include up to 10% domestic or international travel; relocation may be authorized. Candidates must be legally authorized to work in the country of employment without employment-visa sponsorship.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree or higher in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or another technical field, completed and verified before starting.
Seven years of experience in technical product ownership, product management, or software engineering.
At least three years owning or managing search, data platform, or AI-driven product portfolios.
Experience must be in a private, public, government, or military environment.
Legally authorized to work in the country of employment without sponsorship for employment visa status.

Responsibilities

Translate the Director of Product & Portfolio Management’s long-term search and AI platform vision into detailed user stories, technical specifications, and acceptance criteria for search APIs, ingestion pipelines, index architecture, and AI retrieval features.
Own, refine, and prioritize the pod-level backlog to optimize sprint velocity and engineering throughput, balancing platform reliability with new AI capabilities.
Partner daily with the Enterprise Search Tech Lead and vendor engineers during agile ceremonies to clarify execution requirements and align work on relevance tuning, infrastructure-as-code changes, and AI model integration.
Lead user acceptance testing and verify vendor-built and internally developed work against technical benchmarks for search performance, relevance accuracy, API response times, and AI output quality.
Monitor platform utilization and adoption across consuming applications, and relay feedback on search relevance and AI feature effectiveness to the Product & Portfolio Management director.
Define and prioritize requirements for hybrid lexical and semantic/vector retrieval, RAG pipelines, LLM grounding, and agentic AI use cases.
Map competing business-group requirements across search, content, and AI modules, and govern dependencies and release schedules across ingestion workflows, APIs, and downstream digital experiences.
Co-own product release schedules and deployment calendar targets with Program/Project Managers (PVMO), coordinating CI/CD releases and infrastructure changes.
Co-own software quality metrics, architectural alignment, and technical-debt constraints with the Enterprise Search Tech Lead, including index health, pipeline reliability, and AI model performance.
Co-own business-value metrics and customer-satisfaction feedback loops with the assigned Business Relationship Manager, including search relevance KPIs and AI feature adoption rates.
Comply with corporate policies, procedures, and security standards while performing assigned duties.
Follow safety policies, identify hazards, and contribute to continuous improvement and a strong Environmental Health and Safety culture.