About this role: You set the product vision and ensure its execution. From shaping a multiyear roadmap to refining sprint-level stories, you translate mission needs, tech realities, and financial constraints into a coherent strategy-and drive cross-functional squads to deliver capability that matters. Your canvas spans market sensing, portfolio stewardship, agile backlog management, and go-to-market orchestration. You are both strategist and executor, toggling seamlessly between executive conversations and daily dev standups.
What you'll do: Vision & Roadmap
- Define and maintain a 3-year product vision aligned to mission impact and revenue goals.
- Ideate new FTEN functions to support the warfighter (CRAD, IR&D, CRADA) and to increase FTEN market discrimination
- Maintain a rolling 12-month roadmap with quarterly KPI/KPPs; ensure PI objectives trace back to strategy.
Market & Mission Sensing
- Track DoW capability gaps, SBIR trends, and competitor moves; translate insights into differentiated features and value propositions.
- Engage directly with warfighters, acquisition offices, and partners to validate priorities.
Design Thinking
- Exposure to design thinking methods such as problem framing, ideation, prototyping, and iteration.
- Ability to translate user needs, feedback, or pain points into practical solutions or improvements.
Communication
- Ability to explain ideas clearly, ask thoughtful questions, and share updates in a timely manner.
- Comfortable adapting communication style for different audiences, such as peers, managers, customers, or cross-functional partners.
- Experience presenting ideas, documenting decisions, and summarizing complex information.
Financial Stewardship
- Own FTEN execution including cost and schedule of defined Initiatives/Epics/Jira Tickets
- Contributes to the cost model for sustainment and feature development
- Negotiate with Programs for Initiative definition and funding of Features within the Technology Jira Project
- Report progress to stakeholders (cost/schedule) based on execution metrics/tools (IMS, JIRA, etc). Recommend COAs based on progress metrics.
- Defend investment proposals and tradeoffs with executive staff.
Lifecycle & Compliance Governance
- Gatekeep epic approval through SAFe portfolio Kanban; shepherd MVPs from TRL 3 up.
- Ensure compliance with Cyber and Zero Trust accreditation requirements.
- Always have a functional fully featured FTEN system (Golden SUT)
- Governance of 15 FTE matrixed engineers spanning software, network, cyber, design, and systems.
Backlog & Iteration Execution
- Own and continuously groom the Team Backlog; balance new capability, tech debt, and compliance.
- Author crisp Initiatives/Epics/User stories with clear acceptance criteria; approve/reject based on Definition of Done.
- Lead iteration planning, daily syncs, demos, and acceptance to ensure alignment with PI objectives.
Stakeholder Alignment
- Run quarterly Product Syncs with executives, engineers, and finance leads.
- Serve as first-line liaison with Systems Engineering, Cybersecurity, QA, and Ops to resolve impediments.
Go-to-Market Enablement
- Align capture plans, pricing strategies, and demo assets with Growth & Capture (G&C).
- Empower teams to pitch coherent, compelling product stories that withstand source-selection scrutiny.
Continuous Improvement
- Track and act on metrics: velocity, lead time, defect escape rate, and portfolio ROI.
- Drive Inspect & Adapt actions across teams and trains.
RequirementsWe are looking for: - Education: B.S. or higher in an engineering field (Computer Science, Software Engineering, Math, Physics, Electrical Engineering, or related technical discipline).
- Experience: 12+ years of progressive experience in technical leadership, program management, or technical product management.
- Mission-Driven Mindset - Passion for supporting national security missions and advancing warfighter capabilities through user-focused software design.
- Systems Thinking - Ability to translate complex operational requirements into scalable, maintainable software architectures.
- Agile Execution - Strong experience managing Agile development cycles, backlogs, and sprint planning within multi-disciplinary teams.
- People Development - Demonstrated success managing engineers and fostering career growth while driving accountability and performance.
- Cross-Functional Communication - Comfortable collaborating across engineering, product, and customer-facing teams to align vision and execution.
- Experience working with defense, aerospace, tactical communications, networking, C5ISR, edge compute, mission systems, or other mission-critical technology.
- Demonstrated ability to translate customer and operator needs into product requirements, roadmaps, and execution priorities.
- Clearance & Citizenship: * US Citizen.
Nice to have: - Active US Secret or Top Secret clearance.
- Strong technical fluency with IP networking, software systems, RF communications, tactical data links, distributed systems, or network management concepts.
- Experience with tactical radios, MANETs, SATCOM, datalinks, software-defined networking, network orchestration, edge compute, or disconnected/degraded/intermittent/limited-bandwidth environments.
- Experience with AI/ML-enabled network optimization, autonomous network management, or decision-support tools.
- Experience with productizing capabilities that began as customer-specific engineering or R&D programs.
- 5+ years in a dedicated technical leadership or architectural role focused on software.
Must be a nimble self-starter who is excited about technology and has the ability to think out of the box and suggest powerful new ideas.
Salary Range: $145,000 - $200,000
Benefits- Medical, Dental, and Vision
- Employee coverage is fully funded; a portion of dependents' coverage is funded as well
- Date of hire through second year: 10 days/year (accrued)
- After two years: unlimited
- 40 hours of paid sick leave per year
- 401k with employer matching
- Cell phone reimbursement: $100/month
