Technical Product Owner, Payments

Our client is an Enterprise Midwest Retailer and they're growing their back-end Payments team within the Digital org. The Payments team owns the tender, authorization, capture, and settlement flow for all digital orders — credit (including mobile wallets via a tokenization provider), and government benefit tenders (SNAP, WIC) — spanning several backend services and downstream order/financial systems. This contract TPO will own backlog clarity, acceptance criteria, and delivery decisions for one or more of these services, working closely with engineers and architects already on the team. This is a delivery-focused contract role, while they will own and maintain the payment roadmap, in alignemnt to their leader.

What You'll Be Doing

• Translate business and compliance requirements into well-defined features, stories, and testable acceptance criteria for payments/tender flows.
• Maintain backlog ordering, readiness, and transparency for the team(s) you support; make timely scope and priority calls to keep delivery moving.
• Develop a working understanding of the payment pipeline (tender selection, authorization/capture, card tokenization, partial/split capture for marketplace orders, government benefit tender handling) sufficient to make informed tradeoffs with engineering.
• Partner with engineers/architects on discovery and refinement without dictating implementation; flag ambiguous requirements, dependency gaps, and risk early.
• Validate delivered work against acceptance criteria and intended outcome, including coordination of functional/integration testing across tender types.
• Ownership in release readiness for payments changes — understand what's shipping, confirm monitoring/rollback thinking, and support go-live communication.
• Support production issue triage for payments incidents (customer/business impact, ownership, communication) in partnership with engineering.
• Work within the team's existing SAFe Agile ceremonies (planning, standups, backlog refinement, retro).

Must-Have

• Experience as a Technical Product Owner / Product Owner on a software delivery team (Agile/SAFe), not just a business analyst or project coordinator.
• Demonstrated ability to create clear, testable acceptance criteria and break down features into right-sized stories.
• Comfortable discussing APIs, data flows, and system integrations with engineers — enough technical depth to ask the right questions and make scope tradeoffs, not necessarily hands-on coding.
• Experience owning a backlog for a service with real production usage (not just a greenfield project).
• Strong written and verbal communication — this role will need to translate between engineering and business/compliance stakeholders.

Nice-to-Have

• Nice-to-have experience as a software engineer, architect, payment subject matter expert.
• Prior experience in payments, order management, e-commerce checkout, or financial transaction systems.
• Familiarity with event-driven/workflow-orchestration systems (e.g. Temporal, Kafka, GCP).
• Exposure to PCI, tokenization, or other payment-compliance considerations.
• Experience with retail/e-commerce order flows (pickup, delivery, marketplace/3rd-party fulfillment, subscriptions).

Don't Want / Red Flags

• Pure business analyst or project manager background with no backlog/acceptance-criteria ownership. This is a Technical Role.
• No prior experience partnering directly with engineers on technical discovery — purely requirements-gathering and status-reporting.
• Resume emphasizes "coordinated," "scheduled," "tracked status" over "defined," "owned," "prioritized," "decided."