Product Owner

We are seeking an experienced, technically fluent Product Owner to lead and grow a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team supporting BAN/LAN/WLAN Transport Site Reliability Engineering and Operations for a large-scale, geographically dispersed enterprise network. This individual will own the product backlog, manage and develop a team of 8-12 highly technical engineers, and partner closely with other Product Owners across the Transport portfolio (WAN, network boundary, NetDevOps) to align priorities, dependencies, and roadmaps. , The Product Owner is not expected to perform this hands-on engineering work, but must understand it well enough to prioritize it, staff for it, and represent it accurately to non-technical stakeholders. , * Bachelor’s degree with 8-12 years of relevant professional experience; or , * Minimum 3 years of experience as a Product Owner, Scrum Master, or technical program/project lead within a SAFe Agile framework. , * Prior experience directly managing or leading technical teams of 5+ engineers. , * Equivalent education and experience substitutions may be considered at the Hiring Manager’s discretion. , * Demonstrated ability to manage, mentor, and develop a team of 8-12 technical resources. , * Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to translate deep technical detail into terms program leadership and customers can act on. , * Strong stakeholder management skills, including experience partnering with peer Product Owners to manage cross-team dependencies. , * Prior experience as a Product Owner or technical lead specifically within a network engineering, SRE, or NetOps organization. , * Working familiarity with network automation and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) concepts (e.g., Ansible, Python) sufficient to evaluate related backlog items.

• Own, prioritize, and continuously refine the product backlog for the SRE Transport (BAN/LAN/WLAN) team, balancing customer needs, technical risk, operational stability, and mission priorities.\n

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• Translate stakeholder, customer, and program requirements into clear, well-formed features, user stories, and acceptance criteria that technical engineers can execute against without ambiguity.\n

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• Partner with Product Owners across other Transport domains (WAN, boundary, NetDevOps, etc.) to align cross-team roadmaps, sequence dependencies, and resolve competing priorities.\n

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• Maintain and communicate a rolling roadmap for the Transport BAN/LAN/WLAN product line, including upcoming capability investments, technical debt, and modernization efforts.\n

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• Make and defend prioritization calls that require understanding technical dependency chains (e.g., routing/switching changes, SD-WAN rollouts, WLAN upgrades) - not just business value scoring.\n

\n \nAgile Delivery & Program Execution\n \n \n \n

• Serve as the Product Owner within a SAFe Agile framework: lead backlog grooming, sprint planning, story sizing, and sprint reviews.\n

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• Facilitate or actively participate in Daily Stand-Ups (DSUs), retrospectives, Program Increment (PI) planning, and other Agile ceremonies.\n

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• Develop and deliver PI objectives, demonstrations, and technical progress updates to program leadership and customer stakeholders.\n

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• Track team velocity, throughput, and delivery health in ADO; proactively surface blockers, risks, and resourcing gaps.\n

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• Support change management processes by ensuring backlog items tied to network changes, upgrades, and deployments are properly scoped, sequenced, and reflected in change tickets.\n

\n \nPeople & Resource Management\n \n \n \n

• Manage day-to-day performance, workload distribution, and career development for a team of 8-12 technical engineers.\n

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• Conduct 1:1s, performance check-ins, and contribute to formal performance review cycles.\n

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• Support staffing, onboarding, and ramp-up planning for new team members; identify and address skill gaps within the team.\n

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• Coordinate on-call rotations and off-hours maintenance coverage across the team, ensuring adequate staffing for scheduled and emergency work.\n

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• Own team-level administrative responsibilities: timesheet/labor approvals, travel and training requests, and resource forecasting for program leadership.\n

\n \nTechnical & Stakeholder Liaison\n \n \n \n

• Act as the primary bridge between the engineering team and program leadership, customers, and other cross-functional stakeholders - translating in both directions.\n

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• Participate in engineering, architecture, and design review meetings to represent the roadmap and ensure business/mission context informs technical decisions.\n

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• Support Root Cause Analysis (RCA) reviews for major incidents from a program and process standpoint, ensuring remediation items are captured, prioritized, and tracked to closure in the backlog.\n

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• Coordinate Tier III escalation visibility with program leadership, ensuring critical customer-impacting issues are communicated with appropriate urgency.\n

\n \nTeam Technical Scope (For Context)\n \n The engineers on this team are responsible for BAN/LAN/WLAN, network boundary engineering, routing, switching, and network security across an enterprise environment comparable to 16,000+ devices across 450+ geographically dispersed locations, including:\n \n \n

• Configuration, maintenance, and troubleshooting of switches, routers, VLANs, wireless access points, firewalls, and network sensors.\n

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• Tier III escalation support and RCA for complex, multi-discipline incidents.\n

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• Configuration baseline management, DISA STIG compliance, and pre-production lab validation.\n, * A recognized Agile/Product Owner certification (e.g., SAFe POPM, CSPO, PMI-ACP) or willingness to obtain within 90 days of hire.\n

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• DoD 8570.01 IAT Level II or higher certification (e.g., Security+, CASP+, CISSP) preferred; required if role involves privileged access to network management tools.\n

\n \nTechnical & Domain Knowledge\n \n \n \n

• Working knowledge of enterprise BAN/LAN/WLAN and network boundary architecture - sufficient to read engineering designs, evaluate risk, and prioritize accordingly.\n

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• Understanding of defense-in-depth principles and how they shape network security prioritization.\n

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• Strong understanding of configuration management practices, change management processes, and lab validation workflows.\n, n \n

• Experience partnering with multiple Product Owners across a shared technical domain (e.g., a broader Transport or Network portfolio).\n

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• Active or prior Cisco networking certification (CCNA/CCNP) a plus, though not required for this role\n

\n NGEN\n \n If you’re looking for comfort, keep scrolling. At Leidos, we outthink, outbuild, and outpace the status quo - because the mission demands it. We’re not hiring followers. We’re recruiting the ones who disrupt, provoke, and refuse to fail. Step 10 is ancient history. We’re already at step 30 - and moving faster than anyone else dares.\n