Technical Product Owner - Data Platform
Lewisville, TX (Onsite)
Long term contract
About the Role
We are seeking an experienced Technical Product Owner– Data Platform to support the development and governance of an enterprise data platform built on Databricks.
The successful candidate will be responsible for owning the data engineering product backlog, driving Agile delivery, facilitating Scrum ceremonies, and ensuring that high-quality data products are developed and promoted through the Silver, Gold, and Platinum layers of the enterprise data platform.
This role requires a strong combination of technical data knowledge, Product Ownership, Scrum Master capabilities, Jira expertise, SQL proficiency, stakeholder management, and data governance experience.
Key Responsibilities
Product Ownership
- Own and manage the data engineering team's Jira backlog, ensuring work is clearly defined, prioritized, and aligned with business objectives.
- Create and maintain well-defined epics, features, user stories, acceptance criteria, and technical requirements for data engineering initiatives.
- Prioritize backlog items based on business value, technical dependencies, delivery risk, regulatory requirements, and strategic priorities.
- Develop and maintain a rolling data product roadmap, communicating priorities, milestones, dependencies, and delivery status to leadership and stakeholders.
- Partner with business stakeholders, data engineers, data architects, data analysts, and governance teams to translate business requirements into actionable technical work.
- Define and track KPIs and success metrics related to data product quality, coverage, usability, timeliness, and adoption.
- Ensure delivered data products meet agreed business requirements and quality standards.
Data Product & Medallion Architecture Governance
- Govern the end-to-end Silver → Gold → Platinum data promotion process within the Databricks environment.
- Ensure data products meet defined quality, completeness, accuracy, consistency, lineage, and business-alignment criteria before promotion between layers.
- Work closely with data engineering and architecture teams to define standards and acceptance criteria for each medallion layer.
- Validate that Gold and Platinum data products are appropriately modeled and aligned to business use cases.
- Support documentation of data products, data models, business definitions, transformations, and data quality rules.
- Identify data quality issues and coordinate remediation with engineering and data governance teams.
- Promote consistency in data product development, ownership, documentation, and lifecycle management.
Scrum Master Responsibilities
- Serve as Scrum Master for a dedicated data engineering team.
- Facilitate Agile ceremonies, including:
- Backlog Refinement/Grooming
- Remove impediments and proactively identify issues that may impact sprint commitments.
- Protect the engineering team from scope creep, unplanned work, and unnecessary interruptions.
- Track sprint progress, velocity, capacity, dependencies, and delivery risks.
- Identify and escalate blockers and risks to appropriate leadership in a timely manner.
- Promote Agile best practices and foster a culture of continuous improvement, accountability, transparency, and collaboration.
- Work with the Product Owner and engineering team to ensure realistic sprint commitments and predictable delivery.
Technical Requirements
- Strong understanding of Medallion Architecture, particularly Silver, Gold, and Platinum data layers.
- Strong SQL skills, with the ability to:
- Write and interpret complex SQL queries.
- Validate data models and transformations.
- Perform data quality and reconciliation checks.
- Support technical and business documentation.
- Understanding of data modeling, ETL/ELT pipelines, data quality, metadata, lineage, and data governance.
- Strong Jira proficiency, including backlog management, epic/story creation, acceptance criteria, sprint planning, and sprint tracking.
- Experience working with Agile/Scrum methodologies in a technical engineering environment.
Required Experience & Qualifications
- Proven experience serving in both Product Owner and Scrum Master capacities for an Agile engineering/data engineering team.
- Strong experience managing technical backlogs and translating business requirements into actionable engineering work.
- Demonstrated experience writing high-quality epics, user stories, acceptance criteria, and technical requirements.
- Experience managing delivery roadmaps and communicating status to senior leadership and business stakeholders.
- Strong stakeholder management and communication skills.
- Experience working with cross-functional teams including data engineers, architects, analysts, governance teams, and business users.
- Strong analytical and problem-solving capabilities.
- Ability to understand technical data concepts and effectively communicate them to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
