Data Science Product Owner

Leidos has an exciting opening for you, as our next TS/SCI cleared Product Owner, to play a critical role advancing the state of the art in mission-focused big data analytics and predictive analytics for DIA-National Media Exploitation Center (NMEC) under our 10-year DOMEX Technology Platform (DTP) contract. You will have impact as part of a mission focused, solutions oriented, and adaptive team that values innovation, collaboration, and professional development. The selected individual will work closely with the Lead Systems Engineer, Release Train Engineer, and government leads to decompose high priority requirements from the product roadmap into valuable delivered solutions, executing on requirements analysis, design, system integration, and system testing. Candidates for this position require an ability to understand and articulate both business and technical needs, transforming them into actionable items within a software development environment.

As a Data Science Product Owner, you will assist a Data Science Team in delivering advanced data science and machine learning capabilities to push forward national security objectives, swiftly produce and analyze results, disseminate findings, and contribute to presentations with actionable intelligence insights. Our team supports both research and development projects as well as mission critical applications and the work includes applying machine learning libraries such as SciKit Learn, Keras, TensorFlow, or PyTorch to develop and train ML models. While most work is conducted on-site at our client location in Bethesda, MD, we offer a flexible schedule and, occasionally, some tasks may be performed remotely. Percentage of remote work will vary based on client requirements/ deliverables priorities.

Fun stuff you will do on the job:

• Work closely with a tight-knit team of data scientists, as well as a larger team of software developers, network engineers, senior investigators, program managers, researchers, and data analysts to design, build, and optimize a Data Science platform to produce and analyze results, disseminate findings, and contribute to publications and presentations.  
• Provide a single point of contact for the D3P Data Science Team with government customers and stakeholders. Participate in requirements sessions, briefings, and status meetings.
• Develop, manage and continually improve the backlog of work items for an Agile scrum team. Update and prioritize stories and epics via feedback from various program stakeholders ensuring the team is always working on the highest-value tasks.
• Provide technical support, coordination, and execution of product owner activities such as feature/requirements analysis, design, implementation planning, integration and test, sustainment, documentation, deployment, and system assessment.
• Support Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) program increment planning and execution through creation of work tickets as well as program/system documentation using collaboration software.  Participate in all Agile ceremonies to include daily stand up, planning, reviews, and retrospectives.
• Stay informed of increment and sprint progress and work with the team to identify and remove impediments and dependencies.
• Perform backlog refinement on a regular basis. This may include decomposing features into workable stories, prioritizing or reprioritizing items in the backlog for upcoming sprints, refining acceptance criteria and complexity estimates or removing tickets that are no longer relevant.
• Accept or reject completed work based on defined acceptance criteria to ensure delivery of high-quality software.

To be successful in this role you need these skills (required):

• BS Degree and 12-15 years of prior experience or Masters with 10-13 years of prior relevant experience in a quantitative or analytical field such as Engineering, Computer Science, Systems Engineering, Mathematics, Economics, Statistics, Engineering, Physics, or Computational Social Science or related field.
• 10+ years of experience in data science, analytics, or quantitative intelligence analysis, and demonstrating progressive technical development and outcomes.
• Must have an active TS/SCI with polygraph security clearance.
• Experience as a Product Owner, Scrum Master or a similar role in an Agile software development team.
• Demonstrated ability to break down complex problems into actionable steps.
• Experience managing and prioritizing product backlogs effectively.
• Strong understanding of Agile methodologies, and experience with tools for ticketing and documentation (e.g., Gitlab, Jira, Confluence).
• Experience with facilitating scrum for the team (Planning, Retrospective, Grooming & Review/Demo)
• Excellent communication skills (verbal and written) to articulate technical and non