Technical Product Owner

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Meijer Rewards

• Weekly pay

• Scheduling flexibility

• Paid parental leave

• Paid education assistance

• Team member discount

• Development programs for advancement and career growth

Please review the job profile below and apply today!

The Technical Product Owner (TPO) is accountable for translating 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 closely with engineering, architecture, product, operations, security, infrastructure, and business stakeholders to deliver reliable, scalable, secure, and reusable data products that support digital and enterprise experiences. This is a hands-on technical product leadership role. The TPO owns clarity of scope, sequencing, acceptance criteria, dependencies, and release readiness while balancing customer value, operational stability, platform modernization, technical debt, and regulatory or data-governance requirements.

Position will follow our hybrid schedule: Monday-Wednesday in Grand Rapids MI office, Thursday-Friday remote. Relocation assistance is not provided. Immigration sponsorship is not provided.

What You'll Be Doing

• Own and continuously refine the technical product vision, roadmap, and backlog for Data Products, Global Catalog, GraphQL, Storefront APIs, and associated platform capabilities.

• Partner with business Product Owners, engineering leaders, Principal Engineers, architects, and stakeholders to translate business needs into technical features, enablers, user stories, acceptance criteria, and measurable outcomes.

• Prioritize work across new capabilities, production reliability, security, data quality, technical debt, platform modernization, and cloud migration based on customer impact, risk, effort, and strategic value.

• Create and maintain clear feature definitions, process flows, interface requirements, non-functional requirements, dependency maps, and release objectives so engineering teams can execute with minimal ambiguity.

• Lead backlog refinement, iteration planning, system demos, release planning, and other SAFe Agile ceremonies; provide facilitation when needed to keep cross-functional delivery moving.

• Coordinate delivery across GraphQL, Global Catalog, Data Products, Storefront API, cloud platform, vendor, and dependent application teams, proactively resolving sequencing and ownership gaps.

• Work with the Principal Engineer and architecture partners to ensure solutions align with domain architecture, reusable engineering patterns, data standards, security controls, and modernization strategy.

• Define and enforce acceptance criteria for functional behavior and NFRs, 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 ensure solutions 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 in clear business and technical language to team members and leadership.

• Mentor team members in product ownership practices, story quality, outcome-based planning, and effective collaboration between product and engineering.

• Perform feasibility studies and support proofs of concept to evaluate new technologies, architecture approaches, and product opportunities.

Area-Specific Platform Focus

• Data products and domain ownership: Treat data sets, APIs, schemas, and platform services as managed products with defined customers, owners, service expectations, quality measures, and lifecycle plans.

• Global Catalog and product information: Drive capabilities that make product, item, assortment, taxonomy, pricing-adjacent, and related catalog information accurate, discoverable, consistent, and consumable across channels.

• GraphQL and Storefront APIs: Own priorities for schema evolution, federation or composition, resolver behavior, API contracts, versioning, consumer onboarding, performance, caching, and backward compatibility.

• Cloud and data platform modernization: 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.

• Data reliability and governance: Establish measurable expectations for freshness, completeness, accuracy, lineage, access, retention, observability, and incident recovery.

• Operational scale: Balance feature delivery with capacity, latency, resiliency, cost, supportability, and elimination of recurring operational issues across high-volume retail workloads.

What You Bring with You (Qualifications)

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Information Systems, Engineering, Business, or a related discipline, or equivalent combination of education, technical training, and experience.

• 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.

• 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 well enough to guide prioritization and acceptance decisions.

• Experience defining functional requirements 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, with 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.