Staff Product Owner

<p>At Element Biosciences, we are passionate about our mission to empower the scientific community with more freedom and flexibility to accelerate our collective impact on humanity. We have built a highly efficient product-driven organization where employees can learn, grow, and thrive in a challenging but encouraging environment. We are committed to scientific integrity, collegiality, honesty, objectivity, and openness.</p> <p>We're&nbsp;hiring a <strong>Staff Product Owner</strong> to lead software development for our multi-omic data generation instruments. You'll own the product surface where instrumentation, cloud analytics, bioinformatics, and user workflows converge. This is a senior individual contributor role and you won't manage direct reports, but you will set direction across multiple scrum teams and act as the connective tissue between bioinformatics, hardware, chemistry, cloud, and instrument control. You should be comfortable getting hands-on prototyping, writing scripts, running test suites; not just writing tickets. This role will report to our Associate Director, Software Product and will be a San Diego based role<strong>.</strong></p> <p>If you possess the following and want to make a meaningful impact, we invite you to explore this role.</p> <p><strong>Essential Functions and Responsibilities:</strong></p> <ul> <li>Own and prioritize backlogs across multiple scrum teams; translate company initiatives into epics, user stories, and clear acceptance criteria</li> <li>Define and ship product capabilities spanning instrument control, cloud analytics, ML pipelines, and emerging LLM/agent-based user workflows</li> <li>Partner with bioinformatics, cloud, and instrument software teams to design scalable data pipelines, analysis workflows, and control interfaces</li> <li>Be the system SME: understand the architecture and interfaces well enough to make sound trade-off calls and unblock teams technically, not just procedurally</li> <li>Prototype, write scripts, and run test suites to validate ideas, reproduce issues, and pressure-test specs before they reach engineering</li> <li>Lead requirements gathering, requirement analysis, and risk analysis; own the SRS and risk documentation</li> <li>Champion UX and human-centered design so scientists, lab techs, and bioinformaticians can use what we ship</li> <li>Drive cross-team coordination, surface dependencies early, and keep delivery on track with minimal oversight</li> <li>Support troubleshooting during development and sustaining&nbsp;</li> </ul> <p><strong>Education and Experience:</strong></p> <ul> <li>Bachelors degree in Bioengineering, Computer Science or related field with 8–12+ years in life sciences software, with working knowledg