Product Owner - Core Corporate Banking - (12 Month Contract)

We have partnered with a client building a greenfield corporate and investment bank in the UAE to hire a Product Owner for its Core Corporate pod on a 12 month contract. This pod owns the foundational product suite: corporate accounts, virtual accounts, escrow, and cash and liquidity management. Every client-facing channel depends on this product logic, so this is a critical-path hire. There is no legacy platform to maintain and no existing product to inherit. You will help decide what gets built from day one.This is a hands-on product role, not project management, programme management or digital transformation. The client wants a product professional from a build-oriented bank or fintech who has shipped product rather than advised on it, and who knows what good looks like because they helped create it. Consulting profiles without direct ownership of a bank build will not be a fit.About the role:Co-own the product with the Business Owner, deciding what gets built, in what order and why, and making trade-off decisions daily across a wide stakeholder setWrite BRDs, PRDs, process flows, epics, user stories and acceptance criteria to a standard engineers can build from, owning quality and sign-offDesign the business processes behind each product, including sequence, data, decisions and what the client seesLead your product area end to end, identifying gaps and dependencies early and driving them to resolutionWork across Tech, Ops, Risk, Compliance, Treasury and the other pods, including the join between product logic and the channel layerOwn stakeholder communication, presenting progress, flagging risks and driving decisions at steering committees and leadership check-insAbout you:8 to 12+ years of experience, with a background as a Product Owner or Senior PM at a bank or fintech that built or rebuilt its transaction banking or corporate banking platformHas owned a product 0-to-1 or through a major re-platform, running a backlog, making scope trade-offs and shippingDrives a BRD and PRD process end to end personally, with strong command of epics, user stories, customer journeys and process chartsProven record of orchestrating across Tech, Ops, Risk and Compliance in a banking or fintech environment, holding several workstreams togetherConfident presenting to and challenging senior stakeholders, with the ability to turn complexity into clear decisionsExposure to transaction banking (corporate accounts, virtual accounts, escrow, cash and liquidity management or payments). Expert-level depth is not required, as domain experts sit alongside the roleFamiliarity with modern build approaches including cloud-native cores, API-first and event-driven architecture, and configuration over customisation, plus rules-driven product designWorking view of a corporate bank's system landscape and the core banking and payments vendor marketUses AI tools in your own delivery work, with the ability to embed AI in product logic such as analytics-driven liquidity insightGlobal or regional bank experience is welcome, and UAE or GCC exposure is advantageousAvailable at short notice and able to commit to a 12 month contract in the UAE