Product Owner

About Wind River

Wind River is a global leader in delivering software for mission-critical intelligent systems. For more than four decades, the company has been an innovator and pioneer, powering billions of systems that require the highest levels of security, safety, and reliability.

Wind River helps customers across automotive, aerospace, defense, industrial, medical, and telecommunications industries solve complex technology challenges on their journey toward the new intelligent machine economy. The company’s software powers generation after generation of the safest, most secure systems in the world. Examples include playing a key role in NASA space missions such as Artemis I, the James Webb Space Telescope, and multiple Mars rovers. We’ve achieved recent 5G milestones including the world’s first successful 5G data session with Verizon and building one of the largest Open RAN networks in the world with Vodafone. The company has received industry recognition for its technology innovation and leadership, and for its workplace culture, including global Great Place to Work certification and being named a “Top Workplace” for ten consecutive years. If you want to be part of a unique culture where the lived experience is based on our cultural attributes of growth mindset, customer-focus, and diversity, equity, inclusion & belonging, come join us and help advance the future software defined world.

Role Overview

The Product Owner is responsible for translating portfolio-level product strategy into executable engineering work and ensuring alignment between product management, architecture, and engineering teams. This role drives shared understanding of requirements, maintains high-quality backlogs, and enables efficient delivery through structured refinement, dependency management, and process optimization.

Acting as a critical bridge between product and engineering, the role ensures that requirements are well understood, properly scoped, and ready for execution, while maintaining governance over backlog health, risks, and dependencies.

Key Responsibilities

• Product–Engineering Alignment
• Drive shared understanding of portfolio requirements between product management and engineering teams
• Ensure engineering questions are raised to product management and addressed within planning timelines
• Facilitate discovery sessions between product management, architects, and technical leads to clarify requirements
• Backlog Translation & Structuring
• Analyze and interpret portfolio-level product backlogs
• Translate high-level requirements into detailed engineering epics and user stories
• Collaborate with architects and technical leads to define and structure the engineering backlog
• Initiate and lead backlog grooming and refinement sessions
• Backlog Management & Prioritization
• Maintain engineering backlogs across multiple teams in priority order
• Ensure stories are refined, estimated, and ready for sprint planning
• Monitor backlog readiness and continuously drive refinement activities
• Story & Epic Quality Assurance
• Ensure all backlog items meet quality and completeness standards, including:
• Proper assignment to epics and teams
• Clear descriptions and testable acceptance criteria
• Story point estimation and refinement status
• Ensure customer documentation stories are created and aligned across engineering and documentation teams
• Estimation & Refinement
• Lead story refinement sessions with engineering teams to estimate effort
• Track new stories requiring refinement and ensure timely estimation and readiness
• Risk, Dependency & Decision Management
• Identify, raise, and track risks impacting backlog execution
• Manage dependencies across portfolios and teams
• Maintain a RAID log to capture risks, assumptions, issues, and key decisions (e.g., architectural and scope decisions)
• Agile Execution Support
• Participate in daily scrum standups
• Support sprint planning readiness by ensuring backlog quality and completeness
• Enable smooth execution by removing blockers related to requirements clarity
• Continuous Improvement
• Contribute to ongoing process improvements within product and engineering workflows
• Identify opportunities to enhance backlog management, refinement practices, and cross-team collaboration

Required Qualifications

• Proven experience as a Product Owner, Technical Product Owner, or similar role in an Agile environment
• Strong understanding of software development lifecycle and engineering processes
• Experience translating high-level product requirements into detailed technical work items
• Demonstrated ability to manage complex backlogs across multiple teams
• Strong facilitation and stakeholder management skills
• Experience working closely with architects, developers, and UX teams
• Excellent analytical, organizational, and communication skills

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in portfolio-level or scaled Agile environments (e.g., SAFe or similar frameworks)
• Technical background or strong technical acumen
• Experience managing dependencies across multiple teams or programs

This role is compensation range is between $110,000 to $130,000 CAD annual plus annual incentive plan bonus. Compensation is determined through interviews and a review of the education, experience, knowledge, skills, location, and abilities of the applicant, and equity with other team members. Employees in this role are also eligible for the following benefits in accordance with the terms of the Company's plans: health, dental, vision insurance, life insurance, vacation time, eligibility to enroll in RRSP, and paid holidays.

BENEFITS - Canada

• Workplace Flexibility: Hybrid Work.
• Company-sponsored health, dental, and life insurance.
• Income protection through short and long-term disability coverage.
• Matching RRSP.
• Vacation and various time off policies to encourage work-life balance.
• Well-being programs: Employee assistance program, mental well-being through Unmind.
• Learning benefits: LinkedIn Learning subscription and seminars.

APPLICANT PRIVACY NOTICE

Your privacy is of the utmost importance to us. At Wind River, we strictly adhere to all applicable data privacy laws. Please review Wind River's Applicant Privacy Notice, which can be found here .

“Wind River is an equal employment opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability status, protected veteran status or any other characteristic protected by law”

Privacy Notice - Active Candidates:

Aptiv is an equal employment opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability status, protected veteran status or any other characteristic protected by law.