Technical Product Owner, Enterprise Search & AI

3M•Austin, TX

2d•$145,676 - $178,049•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 actionable technical requirements across search infrastructure, AI-powered retrieval, and digital experience platforms. The role prioritizes the day-to-day backlog to deliver scalable, high-performance search capabilities for digital commerce, content discovery, and emerging AI applications. The position partners with the Enterprise Search Tech Lead, vendor engineers, Program/Project Managers, and the Business Relationship Manager. It helps guide platform development toward hybrid retrieval, semantic and vector search, RAG pipelines, LLM grounding, and agentic AI use cases, while sharing accountability for releases, technical quality, business value, and customer satisfaction. This role is based at 3M Center in Maplewood, Minnesota, or the 3M Facility in Austin, Texas. It follows an onsite model requiring work at the selected facility at least four days per week. Travel may include up to 10% domestic or international travel; relocation may be authorized. Applicants 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.
At least seven years of experience in technical product ownership, product management, or software engineering.
At least three years of experience owning or managing search, data platform, or AI-driven product portfolios 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 day-to-day pod backlog to support sprint velocity and engineering throughput, balancing platform reliability with AI capabilities such as hybrid retrieval, semantic search, and RAG-enabled experiences.
Partner daily with the Enterprise Search Tech Lead and vendor engineers during agile ceremonies to clarify execution requirements for search relevance tuning, infrastructure-as-code changes, and AI model integration.
Lead user acceptance testing and verify that vendor-built and internally developed work meets 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 about search relevance and AI feature effectiveness to the Product & Portfolio Management director.
Define and prioritize requirements for platform evolution toward hybrid lexical and semantic/vector retrieval, RAG pipelines, LLM grounding, and agentic AI use cases.
Map and govern competing business group requirements, dependencies, and release schedules across search, content, and AI modules, ingestion workflows, search APIs, and downstream digital experiences.
Share ownership of product release schedules and deployment targets with Program/Project Managers, coordinating CI/CD releases and infrastructure changes.
Share ownership of software quality metrics, architectural alignment, and technical debt constraints with the Enterprise Search Tech Lead, including index health, pipeline reliability, and AI model performance.
Share ownership of 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.
Contribute to 3M’s Environmental Health and Safety culture by following safety policies, identifying hazards, and engaging in continuous improvement.