Cloud Product Owner (Azure)

Improvix Technologies | Federal Mission Systems | Washington, DC

Compensation: $165,000 - $200,000

Location: Washington, DC - hybrid, 4 days onsite per week

Clearance: Active Top Secret required. Secret-cleared candidates considered - we sponsor and support the TS upgrade.

Employment Type: Full-Time

Product ownership in federal cloud work lives or dies on one thing: whether you actually understand what the mission needs. Not the sanitized version that survives three layers of translation - the real thing, from the people who do the work.

Improvix Technologies is hiring a Cloud Product Owner to guide the direction and delivery of Azure initiatives supporting our federal client's mission systems. You'll sit between engineering, government stakeholders, and program leadership - turning mission needs into a clear roadmap and making sure the cloud team builds the right things in the right order.

This is a technical product role. You'll be writing acceptance criteria for infrastructure and migration work, arguing about technical debt with architects who know more than you do about some of it, and explaining to a government program lead why the unglamorous ATO work has to come before the feature they asked for. If that sounds like the good part of the job rather than the tax on it, keep reading.

WHY PRODUCT OWNERS TAKE THIS ROLE

• Direct access to the people you're building for. Four days a week in the same building as your stakeholders means you hear the real requirement, not the third-hand summary.
• Technical enough to be interesting. Cloud infrastructure, migration, and modernization work - with engineers and architects who'll take your questions seriously and expect good ones back.
• A Top Secret clearance, sponsored. If you hold a Secret today, we'll process the upgrade. That clearance follows you for the rest of your career.
• Visible scope. You'll own the backlog, shape the roadmap, and brief leadership on progress, risk, and trade-offs. Your fingerprints are on what gets built.
• Mission that's easy to explain. The systems you help deliver support federal mission operations. You'll know exactly what your work underpins.

WHAT YOU'LL OWN

Backlog & Roadmap

• Own and prioritize the product backlog for Azure cloud initiatives, balancing stakeholder priorities, technical debt, and delivery timelines.
• Translate mission requirements into actionable user stories with acceptance criteria that engineers can build against.
• Partner with engineers, architects, and DevOps staff to define requirements for cloud infrastructure, migration, and modernization work.

Agile Delivery

• Drive sprint planning, backlog grooming, and release planning from the product side in an Agile/Scrum environment.
• Keep the team's work sequenced so dependencies land in the right order and nothing stalls waiting on a decision.

Stakeholder Engagement

• Act as the primary liaison between the cloud team and government stakeholders.
• Track progress against program milestones and communicate status, risks, and trade-offs to leadership - clearly, and early.
• Build the working relationships that let hard conversations happen before they become escalations.

Governance, Security & Compliance

• Support governance around Azure environment configuration, cost management, and compliance with federal security frameworks including FedRAMP and the DoD Cloud Computing SRG.
• Collaborate with security teams so ATO requirements and continuous monitoring needs are reflected in the roadmap rather than discovered late.

WHAT YOU'LL NEED

• 5+ years of product owner or product management experience, including 2+ years focused on cloud platforms.
• Hands-on familiarity with Microsoft Azure services - compute, storage, networking, identity/IAM, and Azure DevOps or similar tooling.
• Demonstrated experience delivering in Agile/Scrum environments.
• Strong understanding of federal IT delivery, including ATO processes and cloud security requirements.
• Excellent stakeholder management skills - equally comfortable briefing an engineering team and a government program lead.
• Active Top Secret clearance, or an active Secret clearance with willingness to be sponsored for TS.
• Ability to work onsite in Washington, DC four days per week.

NICE TO HAVE

• CSPO, SAFe POPM, or comparable product owner certification.
• Azure certifications - AZ-900, AZ-104, or higher.
• Experience supporting DoD or Intelligence Community customers.
• Background in cloud migration or hybrid cloud environments.
• Experience writing or reviewing acceptance criteria for infrastructure work specifically, as opposed to application features.

WORKING HERE

Improvix Technologies delivers secure, modern, integrated technology solutions that keep the nation's most critical systems running. We're small enough that a good idea reaches a decision-maker in a day, and close enough to the mission that you'll know exactly what your work supports.

How decisions actually get made: you'll own the backlog and drive the roadmap, but final priority calls rest with our government stakeholders - as they do on any federal program. Your influence comes from being the person who understands both the mission need and the technical reality well enough that your recommendation is usually the one adopted. If you've done this work before, you know that's the real job.

A straight answer on schedule: four days onsite in Washington, DC, one remote. For this role the onsite time is the point - proximity to stakeholders is most of what makes a federal product owner effective. It isn't a preference we'd trade away later, so we'd rather you know now.

Ready to apply? Send us your résumé. If there's a roadmap you reordered, a stakeholder you brought around, or a piece of unglamorous work you successfully argued into a sprint, tell us about it - that's the conversation we want to have.

On remote work: this role is fully remote within the U.S. You'll need to be available during East Coast business hours for client workshops and stakeholder sessions, and occasional travel may come up for major planning events - but there's no expectation that you relocate or report to an office.

Ready to apply? Send us your résumé. If there's a backlog you cleaned up, a process you fixed, or a stakeholder you talked out of a bad customization, tell us about it - that's what we'll want to hear.