SRE Product Owner

Leidos is seeking a technically fluent Product Owner to lead and scale an SRE product organization supporting Transport site reliability for BAN/LAN/WLAN.

Responsibilities

• Own, prioritize, and continuously refine the product backlog for the SRE Transport (BAN/LAN/WLAN) team, balancing customer needs, technical risk, operational stability, and mission priorities.
• Translate stakeholder, customer, and program inputs into features, user stories, and acceptance criteria engineers can execute without ambiguity.
• Coordinate with Product Owners across other Transport domains (WAN, boundary, NetOpsDev, etc.) to align roadmaps, manage dependencies, and resolve competing priorities.
• Maintain and communicate a rolling roadmap for the Transport BAN/LAN/WLAN product line, covering capability investments, technical debt, and modernization efforts.
• Make and defend prioritization decisions using technical dependency chain understanding (for example routing/switching changes, SD-WAN rollouts, WLAN upgrades), not only business value scoring.
• Run SAFe Agile execution as the Product Owner: backlog grooming, sprint planning, story sizing, and sprint reviews.
• Facilitate or actively participate in Agile ceremonies including DSUs, retrospectives, and Program Increment (PI) planning.
• Develop and deliver PI objectives, demonstrations, and technical progress updates to program leadership and customer stakeholders.
• Track delivery health (velocity, throughput) in ADO; proactively surface blockers, risks, and resourcing gaps.
• Support change management by ensuring network-change, upgrade, and deployment backlog items are properly scoped, sequenced, and reflected in change tickets.
• Manage day-to-day team performance and workload distribution for a team of 8–12 technical engineers.
• Conduct 1:1s, performance check-ins, and contribute to formal performance review cycles.
• Support staffing, onboarding, and ramp-up planning; identify and address skill gaps.
• Coordinate on-call rotations and off-hours maintenance coverage to ensure staffing for scheduled and emergency work.
• Own team administrative responsibilities such as timesheet/labor approvals, travel and training requests, and resource forecasting for program leadership.
• Serve as the primary bridge between engineering and program/customer stakeholders, translating technical detail both ways.
• Participate in engineering, architecture, and design reviews to represent the roadmap and ensure business and mission context informs technical decisions.
• Support Root Cause Analysis (RCA) reviews for major incidents with a program and process lens; ensure remediation items are captured, prioritized, and tracked to closure in the backlog.
• Coordinate Tier III escalation visibility with program leadership, ensuring critical customer-impacting issues are communicated with appropriate urgency.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree with 8–12 years of relevant professional experience, or at least 3 years experience as a Product Owner, Scrum Master, or technical program/project lead within a SAFe Agile framework.
• Prior experience directly managing or leading technical teams of 5+ engineers.
• Active Secret security clearance required.
• Agile/Product Owner certification (examples: SAFe POPM, CSPO, PMI-ACP) or willingness to obtain within 90 days of hire.
• DoD 8570.01 IAT Level II certification preferred (examples: Security+, CASP+, CISSP); required if the role involves privileged access to network management tools.
• Working knowledge of enterprise BAN/LAN/WLAN and network boundary architecture sufficient to read designs, evaluate risk, and prioritize.
• Understanding of defense-in-depth principles and network security prioritization.
• Strong understanding of configuration management, change management processes, and lab validation workflows.
• Proficiency with ADO for backlog, roadmap, and reporting management.
• Demonstrated ability to manage, mentor, and develop a team of 8–12 technical resources.
• Excellent written and verbal communication; ability to translate technical detail for program leadership and customers.
• Strong stakeholder management, including partnership with peer Product Owners to manage cross-team dependencies.
• Strong analytical, prioritization, and conflict-resolution skills.
• Ability to support occasional off-hours coordination for maintenance windows or major incidents.
• Ability to travel up to 10%.

Technologies

• SAFe, ADO, SD-WAN, Ansible, Python, IaC
• Cisco networking certifications (CCNA/CCNP), Security+, CASP+, CISSP

Team Technical Scope (for context)

• Configuration, maintenance, and troubleshooting of switches, routers, VLANs, wireless access points, firewalls, and network sensors.
• Tier III escalation support and RCA for complex, multi-discipline incidents.
• Configuration baseline management, DISA STIG compliance, and pre-production lab validation.
• Product Owner is not expected to perform hands-on engineering, but must understand the work to prioritize, staff, and represent it accurately to non-technical stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting the Navy Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) network or comparable large-scale DoD network environment.
• Experience supporting Department of Defense (DoD) programs.
• Prior experience as a Product Owner or technical lead within network engineering, SRE, or NetOps.
• Familiarity with network automation and Infrastructure as Code (IaC), such as Ansible and Python, sufficient to evaluate backlog items.
• Experience partnering with multiple Product Owners across a shared technical domain (for example a broader Transport or Network portfolio).
• Active or prior Cisco networking certification (CCNA/CCNP) (plus, not required).

Pay and Benefits

• Competitive compensation
• Health and Wellness programs
• Income Protection
• Paid Leave
• Retirement

Location: Norfolk, VA (onsite)

Salary: USD 92,300 - 166,850 per year