Senior Product Owner - Software Development

The Defense Sector at Leidos is seeking a Senior Product Owner to work closely with software development teams, customers, and other product stakeholders to define and deliver high-quality software capabilities. This role is responsible for translating customer needs into clear, actionable product requirements, including user stories, rules, and acceptance criteria that enable efficient development and predictable software behavior.  The ideal candidate combines strong communication skills, structured logical thinking, and experience working in Agile software development environments.

This position requires someone who can operate effectively between technical teams and external stakeholders—balancing priorities, managing expectations, and ensuring that product requirements are clearly defined and understood. This role often requires navigating competing priorities and making difficult trade-off decisions to ensure the most valuable capabilities are delivered efficiently.

Key Responsibilities:

• Translate customer needs and operational concepts into well-defined user stories, rules, and acceptance criteria.

• Develop clear requirement logic using structured rules and defined system behavior, ensuring minimal ambiguity.

• Identify and document expected behavior for edge cases and boundary conditions to prevent gaps in system behavior.

• Maintain and prioritize product backlogs across multiple epics and feature areas.

• Work with development teams to refine stories and ensure they are ready for sprint planning.

• Serve as the primary interface between customers, product leadership, and development teams.

• Communicate requirements clearly in both written and verbal form.

• Facilitate conversations between stakeholders when priorities or expectations conflict.

• Manage trade-offs between customer requests and technical constraints, working to find the most effective solution.

• Participate in Agile ceremonies including backlog refinement, sprint planning, sprint reviews, and retrospectives.

• Maintain artifacts and documentation in JIRA and Confluence.

• Ensure development teams have the information necessary to deliver high-quality work during each sprint.

• Coordinate across multiple epics and development efforts simultaneously.

• Manage frequent context switching across product areas and priorities.

• Support development teams before, during, and after implementation to ensure requirements remain clear and achievable.

Basic Qualifications:

• US Citizen with at least an active Secret security clearance is required to be considered.

• A Bachelor’s degree with 12+ years of experience or a Master’s degree with 10+ years of experience. Additional experience may be considered in lieu of a degree.

• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills.

• Ability to write clear, structured product requirements and logical rules.

• Strong analytical mindset capable of defining system behavior and edge cases.

• Experience working with software development teams in Agile environments.

• Familiarity with JIRA, Confluence, sprint planning, and backlog management.

• Understanding of the Product Owner role in Agile workflows.

• Strong organizational skills with the ability to manage multiple initiatives simultaneously.

• Comfortable operating in fast-moving environments requiring frequent context switching.

• Demonstrated ability to take ownership of problems and drive them to resolution.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Prior experience working with the U.S. military, preferably the U.S. Air Force.

• Familiarity with operational or command-and-control systems.

• Experience with the C2IMERA application.

• While this is not a software engineering role, technical familiarity is highly beneficial.

• Experience with or exposure to:

  • Git or source control systems

  • Model-based systems engineering tools (PlantUML or similar)

  • Behavior-driven development frameworks such as Gherkin or Cucumber

  • API-based software architectures

  • Microservices and distributed systems

  • Relational databases and data modeling

  • Interface definition and system integration documentation

• Desired Attributes

  • Logical, structured thinking

  • Attention to detail

  • Strong ownership mentality

  • Ability to mediate between stakeholders

  • Comfort being the decision maker when tradeoffs are required

  • Professional demeanor when interacting with customers and leadership

Why This Role Matters 

The Product Owner plays a critical role in ensuring the development team builds the right capabilities, the right way, at the right time. Clear product definition and effective communication are essential to delivering reliable software that meets operational needs. 

If you're looking for comfort, keep scrolling. At Leidos, we outthink, outbuild, and outpace the status quo — because the mission demands it. We're not hiring followers. We're recruiting the ones who disrupt, provoke, and refuse to fail. Step 10 is ancient history. We're already at step 30 — and moving faster than anyone else dares.

Original Posting:

For U.S. Positions: While subject to change based on business needs, Leidos reasonably anticipates that this job requisition will remain open for at least 3 days with an anticipated close date of no earlier than 3 days after the original posting date as listed above.

Pay Range:

The Leidos pay range for this job level is a general guideline only and not a guarantee of compensation or salary. Additional factors considered in extending an offer include (but are not limited to) responsibilities of the job, education, experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities, as well as internal equity, alignment with market data, applicable bargaining agreement (if any), or other law.