Technical Product Owner

Overview

REI Systems’ mission is to deliver reliable, innovative technology solutions that advance Federal clients' missions and exceed their expectations. Our technologists and consultants are passionate about solving complex challenges that impact millions of lives. We take a Mindful Modernization® approach in delivering our services, including application modernization, grants management, case management systems, government data analytics, and advisory services. This approach, the REI Way, ensures mission impact by aligning our clients' strategic objectives with measurable outcomes through people, processes, and technology.  We offer the same commitment to our employees by providing professional development, meaningful projects, and flexibility to spend time with family and friends. We believe employees are at their best when fulfilled in both their professional careers and their personal lives. Learn more at www.REIsystems.com.  Employees voted REI Systems a Washington Post Top Workplace in 2015, 2016, 2018, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025! 

Responsibilities

Position Overview

REI Systems is seeking an experienced and technically proficient Technical Product Owner (TPO) to support mission-critical IT modernization and application development initiatives for the FDA.

The Technical Product Owner will serve as a critical bridge between FDA business stakeholders, program leadership, solution architects, development teams, and quality assurance teams to translate complex business and technical requirements into scalable, secure, and high-performing technology solutions.

The ideal candidate will have a strong technical background in enterprise application development, system integrations, APIs, databases, cloud technologies, and Agile software delivery. This individual must be comfortable working closely with software engineers and architects, understanding technical dependencies, managing product backlogs, and driving end-to-end delivery of complex federal IT solutions.

The Technical Product Owner will play a key role in ensuring that product capabilities align with FDA mission objectives, federal security requirements, technical architecture, and overall program priorities.

Key Responsibilities

Product Ownership & Agile Delivery

• Own, manage, and prioritize the product backlog, ensuring alignment with FDA business objectives, technical requirements, and program deliverables.
• Collaborate with FDA stakeholders, business analysts, technical architects, developers, and QA teams to define product vision, requirements, and delivery priorities.
• Translate business and technical requirements into detailed epics, features, user stories, and acceptance criteria.
• Lead backlog refinement, sprint planning, sprint reviews, and product demonstrations in collaboration with Scrum Masters and Agile teams.
• Make informed decisions regarding feature prioritization, technical dependencies, and product enhancements.
• Define and communicate clear acceptance criteria and validate completed deliverables against business and technical expectations.
• Support release planning, roadmap development, and incremental delivery of product capabilities.
• Identify and manage risks, dependencies, blockers, and technical constraints impacting product delivery.

Technical Requirements & Solution Delivery

• Work closely with solution architects and engineering teams to understand application architecture, system integrations, technical dependencies, and implementation approaches.
• Translate complex technical requirements into actionable development tasks and user stories.
• Demonstrate a strong understanding of enterprise application development, including Java, .NET, Angular, and modern web application frameworks.
• Collaborate with engineering teams on RESTful APIs, microservices, backend services, and integration requirements.
• Understand relational databases, SQL queries, data models, and data integration concepts to support requirements definition and troubleshooting.
• Participate in technical design discussions, solution evaluations, and architecture reviews to ensure alignment with business needs.
• Support cloud-based application modernization initiatives, particularly within AWS and other approved federal cloud environments.
• Work with technical teams to identify opportunities to improve application performance, scalability, reliability, and maintainability.
• Understand legacy system modernization challenges, including application migration, integration, and data transformation.
• Collaborate with DevOps teams to understand CI/CD pipelines, deployment dependencies, and release readiness.
• Define and prioritize reusable APIs and common capabilities that support multiple consuming applications and broader FDA adoption.
• Manage requirements for service catalogs, application onboarding portals, and administrative workflows, including self-service requests, approvals, status tracking, and auditability.
• Support API lifecycle management, versioning, backward compatibility, and migration of consuming applications.
• Coordinate service onboarding and adoption, ensuring that application teams have clear integration requirements, documentation, access dependencies, and acceptance expectations.

Stakeholder Management & Collaboration

• Serve as the primary product-level liaison among business stakeholders, service owners, consuming application stakeholders, and application delivery teams.
• Facilitate integration discovery sessions to confirm application use cases, interface requirements, data needs, dependencies, and implementation responsibilities.
• Coordinate across application teams, middleware, infrastructure, security, and platform teams to resolve integration gaps and delivery blockers.
• Assess and communicate the impact of service and interface changes on consuming applications, including required application updates and testing.
• Align application teams on integration milestones, environment availability, onboarding prerequisites, and release readiness.
• Communicate product decisions, scope, risks, dependencies, and delivery status clearly to technical and nontechnical audiences.

Testing, Quality & Compliance

• Partner with QA and testing teams to ensure comprehensive test coverage and alignment with defined acceptance criteria.
• Support functional testing, integration testing, regression testing, and User Acceptance Testing (UAT).
• Review test scenarios and validate that developed solutions meet business and technical requirements.
• Participate in defect triage, prioritization, and resolution discussions.
• Ensure appropriate consideration of federal security, accessibility, and compliance requirements, including FISMA, NIST, Section 508, and FDA-specific standards.
• Collaborate with security and technical teams to ensure product requirements incorporate data protection, access controls, and security considerations.
• Support documentation, audit readiness, and traceability of requirements throughout the software development lifecycle.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in IT, software development, business systems analysis, technical product management, or related technical roles.
• 4+ years of experience as a Technical Product Owner, Product Owner, Technical Business Analyst, or similar role supporting enterprise application development.
• Strong understanding of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), Agile/Scrum methodologies, and iterative software delivery.
• Demonstrated experience managing technical product backlogs, defining user stories, and developing detailed acceptance criteria.
• Strong understanding of enterprise application architecture, web applications, APIs, microservices, and system integrations.
• Working knowledge of Java, .NET, Angular, or comparable enterprise application technologies.
• Experience working with relational databases such as SQL Server, Oracle, or PostgreSQL, including familiarity with SQL queries and data structures.
• Experience supporting cloud-based applications, preferably AWS.
• Familiarity with REST APIs, JSON, XML, and API integration concepts.
• Experience using Agile and requirements management tools such as Jira, Azure DevOps, Confluence, or similar platforms.

Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, or a related field; Master’s degree preferred.

Location: Hybrid - Sterling, VA HQ (with flexibility for remote work as per company policy).

Clearance: Candidate must be able to obtain and maintain a Clearance.

EEO Statement: REI Systems is an Equal Opportunity Employer 

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