Senior Product Owner

About the programmeOur client is a highly prestigious research and innovation institution in Saudi Arabia (name withheld for confidentiality at this stage), delivering a national-level ecological initiative: one of the largest and most ambitious coral reef restoration programmes in the world. The programme is working to restore, protect and understand coral reef ecosystems across a significant stretch of the Red Sea, enhancing and restoring approximately 100 hectares of reef, supported by a new land-based coral nursery that will be among the largest of its kind globally when it opens in 2026. It is a long-term, fully funded national programme running through 2030 and beyond, with ambitions to expand to further Red Sea sites. This role is onsite with client.DigyCorp is the client's strategic digital delivery partner, responsible for the Digital Twin Platform (DTP) and the Coral Restoration System (CRS), the operational inventory-management software used daily by restoration teams. Together these form the digital backbone of the programme: a unified environment spanning data engineering, a 3D immersive digital twin, machine learning and operational tooling used by scientists, nursery and field teams, and programme leadership.The programme's data environment already spans roughly two petabytes across scientific, environmental, spatial and operational domains and is growing rapidly as new sensor deployments, imagery surveys and nursery operations come online. We are looking for a decisive, outcome-driven Product Owner to own the DTP backlog and roadmap, so that every sprint the technical teams commit to is delivering something the programme's scientists, operators and leadership actually need.Role overviewDigyCorp is seeking an experienced Product Owner to own the product backlog and delivery roadmap for the programme's Digital Twin Platform: a multi-disciplinary build spanning cloud engineering, DevOps, solution architecture, backend and frontend development, and data engineering. The role combines product leadership, continuous discovery, stakeholder negotiation and a working command of the technical disciplines involved.You will be the single product authority for the DTP, translating research, scientific and technical requirements into a roadmap the technical teams can execute against, and working directly with the client's research and scientific stakeholders throughout delivery. You must operate confidently with senior client scientists and CXO-level stakeholders on one side and highly technical engineering teams on the other, while maintaining a single, evidence-based view of what is being built, why, and in what order.Governance & delivery modelThis is a governed, fast-moving delivery model with continuous two-week sprints, a rolling quarterly plan, formal change control and release gates that nothing skips. The Product Owner is the product voice within that governance, not outside it.Own the DTP backlog end to end and maintain Definition of Ready (DoR) and Definition of Done (DoD) so that every item entering a sprint is precise, testable and unambiguous.Translate the rolling quarterly plan into a Now–Next–Later, outcome-based roadmap and into sprint-level commitments the technical teams can plan against.Represent the product position at the Programme Status Review, Integration Alignment forum and Change Control Board (CCB), bringing evidence-based recommendations on scope, sequencing and trade-offs.Run continuous, dual-track discovery ahead of sprint commitment, validating requirements and assumptions with scientific and technical stakeholders before work is planned.Surface cross-team risks and dependencies across the five technical disciplines early enough for the teams to plan around them, and feed them into the programme RAID log with clear owners.Key responsibilitiesOwn and prioritise the product backlog, translating input from technical teams and scientific stakeholders into clear epics, user stories and acceptance criteria (INVEST-aligned).Use story mapping to visualise the end-to-end user and stakeholder journey across the platform, sequencing releases around real scientific and operational workflows rather than an arbitrary feature list.Define and communicate the product vision and roadmap using an outcome-based, Now–Next–Later structure, balancing near-term sprint delivery with the programme's long-term goals through 2030 and beyond.Prioritise using value-based frameworks (WSJF, RICE, MoSCoW, cost of delay) to sequence work across the technical teams' outputs and downstream reporting and research needs.Act as the primary bridge between the client's research and scientific stakeholders and the delivery team, managing scope, trade-offs and expectations.Negotiate scope and resolve conflicting priorities across scientific stakeholders and technical teams, finding workable trade-offs without letting disputes stall delivery.Define and track outcome metrics (not just output) for each initiative, and report product outcomes to the client and internal leadership against the roadmap, with an explicit ask or decision where required.Help facilitate sprint planning and sprint reviews/demos, keeping ceremonies focused on outcomes.Track and report delivery health using Agile flow metrics (velocity, burndown/burnup, cycle time, sprint predictability) via Jira or Azure DevOps.Support the team in sound Scrum/Kanban practice and flag delivery impediments to the right owner for resolution.Partner with AI-assisted product and engineering workflows to draft stories and specs, synthesise stakeholder feedback at scale, and keep backlog documentation and reporting current.Required experience & skills8+ years of Agile delivery experience, including at least 6+ years working directly as a Product Owner.Proven experience owning a product backlog and driving delivery for a multi-disciplinary technical platform covering cloud, DevOps, application development and/or data engineering; research or scientific-programme experience strongly preferred.Demonstrable track record of running dual-track or continuous discovery and outcome-based roadmapping, not just feature-list backlog management.Strong stakeholder management with distributed/hybrid teams and senior stakeholders, including direct client-facing experience; Middle East/GCC experience is highly desirable.Enough familiarity across cloud engineering, DevOps, solution architecture, backend/frontend development and data engineering to ask the right questions, follow trade-off discussions and translate technical requirements into an actionable backlog.Fluent in Agile practice and terminology: user stories, epics, backlog refinement, story points, INVEST, DoR/DoD, sprint goals, velocity, burndown/burnup, WSJF, RICE, MVP, dual-track and continuous discovery, outcome-driven delivery.Product discovery and analytics: OKRs and North Star-style outcome metrics, A/B testing and cohort analysis to validate backlog decisions with evidence rather than opinion.Delivery and discovery tooling: Jira (including Jira Product Discovery), Azure DevOps, Confluence; familiarity with roadmapping tools such as Aha! or productboard; facilitation tooling such as Miro, Mural or FigJam; Microsoft Teams.AI-assisted product and agile tooling: Atlassian Rovo / Jira AI and Microsoft Copilot for Azure DevOps, or equivalent, used to streamline discovery, backlog work and reporting.Comfortable collaborating with designers and thinking in terms of the end-user's journey through the platform, enough to sanity-check that backlog priorities serve real user and stakeholder needs rather than technical convenience.Strong executive presentation and storytelling skills: able to turn a roadmap or a hard trade-off into a narrative senior stakeholders can act on quickly. Excellent written and spoken English.Preferred qualificationsBachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, Information Systems, Product Management or a related discipline.Ideal candidateWe are looking for a Product Owner with strong systems thinking who can see the whole platform through the eyes of the scientists and operators who depend on it, and who can hold a clear line on priorities when scientific ambition, technical constraint and programme deadlines pull in different directions. The ideal candidate moves comfortably between discovery sessions with researchers, architecture trade-off discussions with technical leads, sprint ceremonies and executive roadmap reviews, while keeping the backlog precise and the roadmap honest.You combine calm stakeholder presence with disciplined follow-through. Your stories, acceptance criteria, roadmap and outcome metrics stand up to scrutiny; you know when to validate, when to challenge and when to escalate, and you do not allow ambiguity or unresolved trade-offs to accumulate in the backlog.