Technical Product Owner

Job description

### About the Company: Stable Kernel is a technology services firm and custom software developer building scalable software solutions for cutting-edge, innovative enterprises to move their business forward. We are headquartered in Atlanta, GA. We’re a privately held, Great Place to Work Certified Company™ with multi-awards for our amazing culture. Plus we have an impressive 13+ year trajectory of sustainable growth. At Stable Kernel, we support our colleagues in ways that help them do some of the best work of their lives. ### ### About the Role: This is a relationship-first, product-ownership role built on top of your solid technical foundation. You build trust across technical and business audiences, turn ambiguous organizational needs into product strategy, and drive adoption of capabilities teams did not know they needed. You are credible enough to earn the room with engineers and engineering leaders, curious enough to learn any domain fast, and smart enough to know when to bring a Principal Engineer partner into a high-stakes technical conversation. Your differentiating value is your ability to connect with and to influence people. Our client's Quality Engineering team has built a meaningful portfolio of quality and testing capabilities: test data services, quality gates, performance testing, ephemeral environments, and more. QE now sits inside Platform Engineering as one of its three core pillars, and the next stage of its evolution is turning what has been built into a scalable, adopted platform that engineering teams across the organization actively consume. As a Stable Kernel Technical Product Owner (TPO), you’ll be the single owner of the connective tissue between the QE portfolio and its internal customers: structured discovery, prioritization decisions, the product roadmap, adoption, and the feedback loop that drives iteration. You will unblock engineers so they can focus on building, gather requirements from QE’s consumers to help shape the roadmap, and educate and advocate for expanded internal adoption of QE’s products. This role will report directly to our Principal Business Analyst Lead. ### ### **What Success Looks Like:** The vision: make quality engineering an easily consumable platform capability across the engineering organization, enabling product teams to build, test, and release high-quality software faster without independently solving the same quality problems. The TPO turns that vision into a working strategy. Near term, that means clarifying capability readiness and ownership, identifying target adopter teams, evangelizing usable solutions, and establishing direct feedback loops with lightweight adoption measures. Strategically, it means maturing the flagship capabilities, establishing common quality patterns, integrating QE into developer workflows, and building the 6 to 12 month product roadmap. Just as important is what the strategy defers: large generalized solutions without identified consumers, polishing tools before meaningful validation, and solving every edge case before release. **Long-Term Outcomes** Over time, this role compounds value in three ways: - Business impact: faster, safer delivery through earlier validation, fewer escaped defects and production issues, and less duplicated testing investment across product teams. - Quality of life: QE capabilities that are easy to discover and consume, with reduced tribal knowledge, repeated support burden, and dependence on individual gatekeepers. - Strategic positioning: quality engineering established as a strategic enablement function that helps shape quality strategy rather than simply supplying delivery capacity. ### ### Core Responsibilities Include: **Evangelism and Adoption**: - Actively evangelize the QE tool portfolio and quality practices across engineering pods, translating capability into concrete value for each team. - Identify target adopter teams, clarify capability readiness and ownership, and establish lightweight adoption measures and direct feedback loops. - Champion shift-left quality practices at every level, from individual engineers to business leaders who control roadmaps and funding. - Reduce dependence on localized knowledge and individual gatekeepers by making QE capabilities easy to discover, understand, and consume. **Relationship and Stakeholder Leadership** - Build durable, trust-based relationships across client engineering pods, engineering leadership, and the business stakeholders who influence investment. - Be on-site with client teams one to two times per week, building the in-person presence and cultural fluency this client values deeply. - Influence both technical and non-technical audiences: engineers who will adopt the tools, and business leaders who will put QE work on their roadmaps. - Serve as a strategic partner who anticipates misalignment, brings the right people together, and represents Stable Kernel with professionalism in conversations involving scope, priorities, and delivery direction. **Discovery and Requirements** - Lead structured discovery with engineering pods to clarify problem spaces, validate assumptions, and turn ambiguous needs into well-shaped requirements. - Build and document requirements in partnership with QE engineers, ensuring solutions address real consumer needs and integrate into developer workflows. - Recognize repeatable patterns across teams and surface them as platform opportunities rather than one-off requests. **Product Ownership and Backlog Leadership** - Own the QE product backlog end to end: intake, refinement, prioritization, and sequencing driven by validated consumer needs rather than assumptions. - Run scrum ceremonies and delivery cadence for the QE team. - Define and continuously refine a 6 to 12 month product roadmap grounded in structured discovery, early adoption signals, and measurable feedback. - Evaluate trade-offs across solution options, frame value versus effort, and make clear, defensible prioritization calls that keep engineers building and the product evolving to serve its users ### ### Our Ideal Candidate - 8 or more years in technical product ownership, systems analysis, technical program leadership, or an adjacent role bridging business and engineering. - Demonstrated relationship building across cross-functional technical and business stakeholders amid ambiguity and minimal direction. This is the primary axis of the role. - Exceptional communication: able to read a room, communicate at the right level for the audience, and influence decisions at the team, leadership, and executive levels. - Proven experience evangelizing tools, platforms, or practices and driving measurable adoption across teams that did not report to you. - Technical credibility: proven success in a technical domain, comfort holding technical conversations with engineers, and demonstrated capacity to learn new technical domains quickly. Engineer-level depth is not required; a Principal Engineer partners with this role in high-stakes technical discussions. - Strong product ownership fundamentals: backlog management, prioritization frameworks, roadmap definition, and running agile ceremonies. Able to take on scrum master responsibilities. - Self-directed initiative: creates their own timeline, controls their own narrative, and operates as a trusted advisor with minimal oversight. - Local to Atlanta and genuinely excited, not merely willing, to be in person at the client office one to two times per week. ### ### Nice to Haves: - A degree, training, or certification in computer science or a related technical field. - Exposure to test infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, performance and load testing, or developer platform tooling. - Experience in or alongside platform engineering, developer experience, or internal platform product teams. - Consulting or client services background with trusted-advisor experience. ### ### A Bit More Info: Minimum Base Compensation: $130,000 This is a full-time position. Stable Kernel operates a People Before Place Hybrid model, allowing most employees to choose where they can do their best work most days. Travel may be associated with this role as it requires you to maintain an in-office presence in a hybrid capacity for regular in-person engagements for both clients and internal teams. Our generous total compensation package includes: - Company-subsidized health, vision, and dental plan premium options beginning on the first day of employment - 401k with above-average company matching - Fully paid Group Life, Short and Long Term Disability, and AD&D insurance - Optional Flexible Spending Account, Dependent Care Flexible Spending Account, and Health Savings Account participation - Voluntary Life, Critical Illness, and Accident insurance - EAP and Health Advocacy program available at no cost to employees and their dependents - $1500-3000 annual industry educational budget - Paid time off and paid holidays - Access to Perks at Work program featuring a variety of discounted products and services ### \*Note – We are not sponsoring employment visas at this time. If you are currently in possession of an employment visa, it will need to be effective for at least 3 years from the date of your application for your candidacy for employment to be considered. ### Stable Kernel’s culture is inclusive and expansive. We celebrate diversity in its many glorious forms and do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender role orientation, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. However, we will discriminate against those unwilling to comply with the practice of our company values: - we work with integrity always - we respect our work and each other - we are dedicated to life-long learning and sharing - we stay hungry for new challenges If you are like-minded in this regard, we hope you will apply. We look forward to meeting you. ###