Technical Product Owner

Department:
Operations

Location:
Bristol, UK

Description
We're building the UK's next generation engineering powerhouse, providing critical technology that strengthens national security and resilience.
At Rowden, we design and integrate advanced systems that sense, connect, and protect data in challenging environments where quick decisions are vital. Our solutions use intelligent automation to enhance speed and efficiency and are built to be reliable and straightforward for critical operations in remote or high-pressure settings.

Headquartered in Bristol (UK), we combine modern engineering methods with cutting-edge commercial technology to create adaptable, mission-critical systems. We focus on solving the tough challenges that others overlook, ensuring our customers can operate effectively in an ever-changing world.

About the role
We're seeking a Technical Product Owner to lead a strategic, company-wide initiative to design and implement a centrally managed engineering platform. This is a career-defining opportunity to drive fundamental change in how one the UK's most exciting engineering companies builds, deploys, and operates technology. Working at the intersection of Software, Cloud, DevOps, Machine Learning, IT and Security, you'll define the platform engineering vision and lead the cultural and technical transformation required to realise it. This is a hands-on role that requires proven experience designing and building complex engineering platforms.

Your Mission
Your mission is to define and deliver the platform that will enable Rowden's engineering teams to build and deploy systems faster, more securely, and more consistently. You will translate strategy into action - selling the vision, aligning teams, and defining clear and measurable outcomes. You'll bring clarity, structure, and momentum to a complex transformation programme, ensuring technical excellence, usability, and adoption.

Salary
Rowden is a growing business, we are offering a competitive salary depending on experience, and we encourage candidates at all levels to apply.

Candidates must be eligible for SC Clearance.
More information about security clearance is available here:

Key areas of responsibility
As the Technical Product Owner, you will be responsible for:

• Defining the platform engineering vision and roadmap.
• Ensuring alignment with Rowden's business and engineering strategy.
• Working collaboratively across teams (IT, Infrastructure, DevOps, Software, ML, and Security) to build shared ownership of the platform.
• Championing the developer experience and acting as the voice of the user, ensuring the platform reduces friction and empowers teams to deliver value at pace.
• Coordinating platform adoption, onboarding teams, and tracking success metrics such as deployment frequency, lead time, and developer satisfaction.
• Establishing standards, governance, and guardrails for infrastructure, deployment, and security best practice, while balancing useability and pace.
• Driving delivery of the internal developer platform (IDP) and platform management layers, enabling self-service provisioning, consistent CI/CD pipelines, and integrated observability and monitoring.

Key skills, experience and behaviours
We are looking for a strategic, technical leader who thrives on bringing clarity to complex systems, while driving meaningful and lasting change. You'll need:

• Proven experience of building and managing engineering platforms.
• A strong understanding of platform engineering principles and disciplines (cloud infra, CI/CD, IDPs, security, monitoring, and platform orchestration).
• Exceptional stakeholder management and communication skills, and the ability to translate between technical and non-technical audiences.
• A delivery-focused mindset, able to balance strategic vision with pragmatic execution.
• Familiarity with modern software delivery and MLOps pipelines, CI/CD tooling, and secure-by-design practices.
• Experience defining metrics and KPIs to measure platform adoption and impact.

Behaviours That Matter

• Mission-Focused: You care deeply about our engineers and the impact of what they build.
• Relentless: You are laser-focused on delivery and achieving results.
• Collaborative: You work across functions to create alignment and shared ownership.
• Inspiring: You bring people on the journey, building trust and enthusiasm for change.
• Pragmatic: You focus on real, usable outcomes that make engineering better every day.
• Curious & Adaptive: You continuously seek better ways of working and aren't afraid to challenge the status quo.

Working at Rowden
We are committed to building a flexible, inclusive, and enabling company. Our aim is to create a diverse team of talented people with unique skills, experience, and backgrounds, so please apply and come as you are

We also recognise the importance of flexible working and support this wherever we can. We typically operate a flexible, hybrid-working model, with an average 3 days in the office each week (dependent on the role). We welcome the opportunity to discuss flexibility, part-time working requirements and/or workplace adjustments with all our applicants.

Rowden is a Disability Confident Committed company, and we actively encourage people with disabilities and health conditions to apply for our roles. Please let us know your requirements early on so that we can make sure you have everything you need up front to help make the recruitment process and experience as easy as possible.

Finally, if you feel that you don't meet all the criteria included above but have transferable skills and relevant experience, we'd still love to hear from you