Senior Product Owner

Environmental Science Associates (ESA) is looking for an experienced Senior Product Owner with a minimum of 10 years of experience to join our dynamic software development team based in Portland, Oregon. This is a hybrid position that supports conducting most work from a flexible location of your choosing. ESA’s agile teams have the option to meet in person a few times a month for sprint planning and retrospectives and may choose to work together in ESA’s office a few days a week. We are therefore seeking candidates located in the vicinity of Portland who will be available to occasionally travel to the Portland office.

Who You Are

• You are an experienced Product Owner with a minimum of 10 years of experience in leading the design, development, deployment, and operations of multi-faceted, custom data management solutions and/or software products, preferably for federal, state, and regional natural resources agencies. You have served as a technical specialist, selecting, applying and adapting standard techniques, methods, technology, and procedures to translates business requirements to a proposed technical solution.
• You are an effective team member and communicator who proactively identifies and contributes constructively to address broad project or team issues, providing mentoring and coaching to more junior staff to foster teamwork. You have experience as a Scrum Master, leading team rituals, managing agile development sprints, and ensuring team health is monitored and maintained.
• You possess excellent oral and presentation skills and have participated in client and project stakeholder meetings to understand their workflow and develop tools and systems, and then led your interdisciplinary project team to deliver project assignments on time and within budget. You have experience tackling problems from both the perspective of the end user and the developers and can help unify viewpoints and identify specific solutions.
• You have experience with software development life cycle and collaboration tools (e.g., Github, JIRA, Teams, Egntye), relational (SQL) and Non-relational (NoSQL) database experience and experience with object-oriented programing, release management, geospatial software development, and open source technology.
• You hold a bachelor’s degree in a related field and are able to pass a federal and/or state background check for project-based assignments.
• You have experience as a project manager, managing scope, schedule, and budget for moderate to high complexity projects.
• Ideally you also have experience with the environmental permitting process, environmental & construction compliance, and/or mobile field data collection for compliance. If you don’t have this experience, you are ready to quickly learn all that you can so that you can support clients with user-friendly, robust software solutions to make the compliance process efficient and joyful.

What You Will Do for ESA

As a Product Owner, you will be responsible for implementing our client-facing applications and platforms for large environmental tracking systems and integration projects. By partnering with UX designers, graphic designers, other product owners, business analysts, developers, architects, and leadership, you will ensure successful execution of all phases of delivery.

You will serve as a technical specialist, interpreting and processing complex environmental data and workflows, establish test and release processes, and create and deliver technical documentation and application solutions using best practices and standards. Systems thinking and data modelling are core to how you operate, and familiarity with data analysis and visualization is desirable.

You will demonstrate a clear understanding of project management principles and practices related to estimation and backlog refinement for selected tasks and/or projects of moderate complexity in accordance with applicable guidelines and requirements, while delivering assignments within budget and on schedule.

You will provide mentorship and support for junior staff, including reviewing their work for accuracy and clarity and providing constructive feedback and career development guidance while working on projects together.

You will thrive in a fast-paced, challenging environment and be able to manage multiple responsibilities and deadlines while working on a team or independently.

What’s Special About Our Technology Services Team

Our team designs and builds applications that help protect, mitigate, and enhance fish and wildlife on the Columbia River and its tributaries, mitigate the groundwater crisis in California, identify restoration opportunities in riparian habitats in Washington State