Chief Software Product Owner Level 5

Software Chief Product Owner

At Northrop Grumman, our employees have incredible opportunities to work on revolutionary systems that impact people's lives around the world today, and for generations to come. Our pioneering and inventive spirit has enabled us to be at the forefront of many technological advancements in our nation's history - from the first flight across the Atlantic Ocean, to stealth bombers, to landing on the moon. We look for people who have bold new ideas, courage and a pioneering spirit to join forces to invent the future, and have fun along the way. Our culture thrives on intellectual curiosity, cognitive diversity and bringing your whole self to work - and we have an insatiable drive to do what others think is impossible. Our employees are not only part of history, they're making history.

The Payload and Ground Systems organization within the Northrop Grumman Space Systems pushes the boundaries of innovation, redefines engineering capabilities, and drives advances in various sciences. Our team is chartered with providing the skills, innovative technologies to develop, design, produce and sustain optimized product lines across the sector while providing a decisive advantage to the warfighter. Come be a part of our mission.

You'll be joining an existing on-contract classified portfolio called Swordfish and one of its programs we call "Starfleet" that is supporting a critical national security mission that is both in major development and operations. The program team is based in Aurora, CO yet has distributed team members located at several other Northrop Grumman sites across the US as well as at collaborating partner company sites. Some of the program's baseline and environments are unclassified allowing some software development outside of a secure facility. The team located in Aurora is roughly 25 staff primarily composed of software developers organized into agile scrum teams that primarily work in two large rooms with cubicle like individual spaces (yet a few have dedicated offices) then has a high side integration, test, and deployment lab. The program's culture is agile, fast-paced, high performing, proactive, collaborative, and welcoming of new ideas, technologies, and tools that could benefit the mission or help the team be more productive or produce a higher quality product.

As a Software Chief Product Owner, you'd be joining the Starfleet program. The Chief Product Owner (CPO) leads product strategy across multiple agile teams, ensuring alignment with customer needs/requirements and technical capabilities, informed by the Chief Engineer (CE) and Chief Architect (CA). The CPO will have to balance strategic vision with tactical execution, driving cross-team collaboration, backlog prioritization, and managing stakeholder expectations to deliver high-impact outcomes. The CPO is the technical authority responsible for executing overall software engineering effort on the program and directing the execution of all software engineering activities.

The Starfleet program's CPO has the following roles and responsibilities:

• Reports programmatically to the Starfleet Program Manager (PM)
• Main technical POC to the customer for backlog management guidance
• Accountable for ensuring accurate and timely delivery of software
• Accountable for the deployed software products
• Supports Risk and Opportunity Management process by identifying and owning applicable risks
• Responsible for horizontal (across Starfleet teams) and vertical (across external teams) scope and schedule of software deliverables
• Manages the program Backlog and ensure non-functional requirements are captured as part of Product Definitions
• Accountable for software product planning based on Government objectives
• Work with Program and Functional Management to ensure the Software Team has qualified personnel to execute
• Responsible for the transition of the software product to Operations
• Final authority for release scope and schedule
• Ensure Mission Engineering is informed and jointly conduct technical solution analysis with CE and Mission Engineering

Basic Qualifications:

• Must have an active U.S. Government DoD Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) security clearance at time of application.
• Ability to pass a Counterintelligence Polygraph (CI-Poly) (not required to start)
• Bachelor's degree in science with 12+ years of relative experience; 10+ years of relative experience with a Master's; or 4 additional years of relative experience may be considered in lieu of a degree.
• At least 2 years of experience writing production level software for mission critical systems
• At least 3 years of experience in a software team leadership role
• Experience developing software products in an agile product development lifecycle
• Demonstrated communication skills and visionary on business, user experience, and technical sides of product development.
• Demonstrated interpersonal and problem resolution skills

Preferred Qualifications:

• Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or similar
• Prior completed Counterintelligence Polygraph (CI-Poly)
• Knowledge of principles of Data Management, Event Driven Architectures, and Microservices
• Experience in a Chief Product Owner (or similar) role leading a team of Product Owners
• Experience developing software products in an agile product development lifecycle in a Scaled Agile framework with Product Owners, Scrum Masters, Release Train Engineer (or Chief Scrum Master) and multiple Agile Scrum teams
• Prior engineering or development experience with the Space Industry
• Experience sharing knowledge, mentoring, and working in a collaborative environment
• Product owner certification or any other major Agile certification
• Experience with Atlassian tool suite (Jira and Confluence)
• Ability to travel (limited, up to 10%)