Technical Product Owner for Kubernetes

AS A... growing open-source infrastructure management platform used by modern enterprises WE WANT TO find a Product Owner with experience in the tech industry to help develop our Kubernetes-as-a-Service product. We have multiple teams working on AWS, Azure, Vmware, and bare-metal Kubernetes solutions. The product is open-source and we are a diverse, remote (since 2014) and experienced team, that is growing and spread across Europe - with a headquarters in Cologne.

SO THAT we can empower developers around the world to ship great products.

YOUR JOB

tl;dr: You are responsible for the success of our product ;) But of course, you are not alone. We currently have 2 PO's and 3 Architects and all team members are engaged in the product process.

• You become the owner of the product vision for your teams.
• You help your team maximize the impact of their work. Many product ideas start as technical solutions. You are persistent and creative in figuring out the business and user problems these ideas can solve.You manage the Product Backlog of your team(s) and write user stories.
• You help your team avoid overwork. There is always more stuff to do than time to do them with. You and your team have the freedom to decide what is most important and to do only that. You lead this prioritization.
• You enable other parts of the company to understand your team's work and its value. You translate between engineers, other POs, and sales and marketing.
• Our customers love to work with us and see us as their extended team. You collaborate with them to build products they will use and love.
• You ensure that current and prospective customers are informed about the cool stuff we are building (Documentation, blog posts, and other media such as speaking if that's something you are interested in.).
• You can choose to participate in cross-cutting groups throughout the company to drive topics that you are passionate about (eg. culture, customer happiness, security etc).

REQUIREMENTS

• You have a strong, at least 5 year background being a Technical Product Owner in a tech driven environment (best case, you know stuff about enterprise software, cloud, open source and distributed systems).
• You don't need to be a coder, but a basic knowledge of Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure and a bit of programming experience will help you to understand what we and our customers are doing.
• Ideally, you have already gained work experience in the larger Kubernetes ecosystem.
• You find the right tone for all stakeholders. Especially with our cross functional engineering teams - you are available and engaged.
• You can deal with being empowered to make decisions.
• You are familiar with agile methodologies, but work with your team to figure out and iterate on the processes that work for your unique needs.
• You are happy to work in a fast changing environment and adapt the way you work according to the current status of the company. We are operating in the evolving container ecosystem; the whole market is highly volatile.
• You have excellent English skills and you are based somewhere in Europe, as most of your team members are in this timezone as well.

Pro tips for anyone who wants to apply at Giant Swarm from our team:

Have and articulate (1) a clear view of what your role is, and (2) a framework/approach for how you would apply that to Giant Swarm's context (not just what you did in your last company, but how you would adapt that to Giant Swarm's context). (Chiara Cokieng, PO)

Interested? Questions? Coffee? Contact Mirco mirco@giantswarm.io or apply directly

ABOUT US

Every new team member changes the team. We love to learn from each other and people who know things we don't are highly welcome. And even though we are almost 70 people we aim at putting the individual first when taking decisions, establishing processes, etc. You'll find that from day one, your work will make a difference and will be highly valued. There are no meaningless tasks and you'll soon realize that the company is full of people who are passionate about their jobs. Our strong culture of failure helps us stay up to date and try new things. Even though we've been fully remote since 2014, we still like to meet in person twice a year at our onsites (make sure you check out our Instagram ;) ) as well as at conferences and events (as soon as they start again). Continuous learning is important to us - we foster this through bi-yearly personal development talks, a budget for training/certifications/coaching as well as regular feedback talks. Becoming part of Giant Swarm means that, by extension, you also become part of the Cloud Native community. We actively contribute to upstream projects and our quarterly hackathons will give you space to work on out-of-the-box projects. Occasionally, when we, as a team, want to fully focus on one project, we scratch all meetings and routines for a certain time to better focus during our hive-sprints.

BASICS

• We don't count holiday (our team members take between 25-35 days off on average)
• Choose your own hard- and software
• As a company that has almost, if not more, kids than employees, family-friendliness is crucial to us and paid parental leave is a no-brainer.
• Healthcare compensation
• Fixed monthly budget for buying cat pictures or your mobile phone contract/ co-working space if you are boring ;)
• We aim to be fully transparent (finance, salaries, communication, etc.)

We failed in exactly describing our way to approach important company elements that can be described with 'buzzwords' such as agile mindset, cross-functional teams, self-organization, value of the individual or trust & teamwork. However, we truly care about them, we live them and we constantly iterate on them. Some snippets about how we do this are posted in our blog but by far not all of them.

Pro tip: Ask whenever something is unclear!