Technical Product Owner

Meijer•Grand Rapids, MI

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Technical Product Owner (TPO) translates business outcomes and platform strategy into an executable technical roadmap and prioritized backlog for Meijer Data Products, Global Catalog, GraphQL, and related data-serving capabilities. The role partners with engineering, architecture, product, operations, security, infrastructure, and business stakeholders to deliver reliable, scalable, secure, and reusable data products supporting digital and enterprise experiences. This hands-on technical product leadership role owns clarity of scope, sequencing, acceptance criteria, dependencies, and release readiness. It balances customer value, operational stability, platform modernization, technical debt, and regulatory or data-governance requirements. The position follows a hybrid schedule: Monday through Wednesday in the Grand Rapids, Michigan office and Thursday through Friday remote. Relocation assistance and immigration sponsorship are not provided.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Information Systems, Engineering, Business, or a related discipline, or an equivalent combination of education, technical training, and experience.
At least 6 years of experience in technical product ownership, product management, technical program management, business systems analysis, software engineering, data engineering, solution delivery, or a related field.
At least 3 years of experience owning a technical platform, API, data product, or enterprise domain end to end, including roadmap, backlog, delivery, and production lifecycle responsibilities.
Experience working with Agile and SAFe practices, including feature decomposition, backlog refinement, iteration planning, dependency management, system demos, and program increment planning.
Strong technical fluency with APIs, microservices, GraphQL or REST, event-driven integration, data pipelines, databases, caching, cloud platforms, CI/CD, and observability concepts.
Ability to understand architecture diagrams, API contracts, data flows, logs, metrics, and technical trade-offs sufficiently to guide prioritization and acceptance decisions.
Experience defining functional and non-functional requirements for security, reliability, performance, scalability, maintainability, and recoverability.
Experience using production telemetry and incident learnings to prioritize reliability, performance, and root-cause remediation.
Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical concepts, risks, and trade-offs in business terms.
Demonstrated ability to influence without direct authority, manage competing priorities, and align multiple teams around shared outcomes.
Analytical, problem-solving, facilitation, and decision-making skills, with a bias toward clarity, ownership, and measurable results.

Responsibilities

Own and continuously refine the technical product vision, roadmap, and backlog for Data Products, Global Catalog, GraphQL, Storefront APIs, and associated platform capabilities.
Translate business needs into technical features, enablers, user stories, acceptance criteria, and measurable outcomes with business Product Owners, engineering leaders, Principal Engineers, architects, and stakeholders.
Prioritize new capabilities, production reliability, security, data quality, technical debt, platform modernization, and cloud migration according to customer impact, risk, effort, and strategic value.
Create and maintain feature definitions, process flows, interface requirements, non-functional requirements, dependency maps, and release objectives.
Lead backlog refinement, iteration planning, system demos, release planning, and other SAFe Agile ceremonies; facilitate cross-functional delivery as needed.
Coordinate delivery across GraphQL, Global Catalog, Data Products, Storefront API, cloud platform, vendor, and dependent application teams, resolving sequencing and ownership gaps.
Work with the Principal Engineer and architecture partners to align solutions with domain architecture, reusable engineering patterns, data standards, security controls, and modernization strategy.
Define and enforce acceptance criteria for functional behavior and non-functional requirements, including security, reliability, availability, performance, scalability, observability, maintainability, recoverability, and usability.
Own release readiness with engineering and operations, including implementation plans, dependency validation, test evidence, production support readiness, rollback plans, communications, and post-release verification.
Use telemetry, logs, traces, data-quality metrics, service-level indicators, incidents, and customer feedback to guide prioritization, root-cause follow-up, and continuous improvement.
Participate in incident response and problem management by clarifying business impact, coordinating stakeholders, tracking remediation, and ensuring durable corrective work is represented in the backlog.
Partner with Security, Infrastructure, Cloud Platform, Data Governance, Privacy, and Legal teams to meet enterprise requirements for access, retention, lineage, quality, and compliance.
Coordinate vendor and third-party platform work, including requirements, integration planning, delivery commitments, upgrade readiness, and service-level expectations.
Communicate roadmap status, risks, decisions, trade-offs, and delivery outcomes to team members and leadership in clear business and technical language.
Mentor team members in product ownership practices, story quality, outcome-based planning, and collaboration between product and engineering.
Perform feasibility studies and support proofs of concept to evaluate new technologies, architecture approaches, and product opportunities.
Treat data sets, APIs, schemas, and platform services as managed products with defined customers, owners, service expectations, quality measures, and lifecycle plans.
Drive Global Catalog and product-information capabilities so product, item, assortment, taxonomy, pricing-adjacent, and related catalog information is accurate, discoverable, consistent, and consumable across channels.
Own GraphQL and Storefront API priorities for schema evolution, federation or composition, resolver behavior, API contracts, versioning, consumer onboarding, performance, caching, and backward compatibility.
Support roadmap and delivery decisions involving Azure services, GCP services, event-driven integration, Kafka, Flink, data pipelines, streaming, operational data stores, and cloud-native deployment patterns.
Establish measurable data-reliability and governance expectations for freshness, completeness, accuracy, lineage, access, retention, observability, and incident recovery.
Balance feature delivery with capacity, latency, resiliency, cost, supportability, and elimination of recurring operational issues across high-volume retail workloads.