We are looking for a Technical Product Owner for Kubernetes

Giant Swarm is a fast growing open source infrastructure management platform used by modern enterprises. Our vision is to empower developers around the world to ship great products.

We're a distributed, diverse, and growing team, spread across Europe. The company is based in Cologne, Germany, where we have a small office in a coworking space. However, only a few people work there. All workflows are created to function remotely - but of course, if you want to visit Cologne, you are more than welcome!

While we are remote first, we appreciate quality time with our co-workers, so we meet in person twice a year to work and have fun together.

Work-life integration

• Flexible working hours, and working from home or anywhere you prefer but please note that your permanent location should be somewhere in Europe.

• Currently, the number of kids from our team members outnumbers the number of employees.

• We don’t only care about the kids “within” the company, but also about all children - for example, we compensate the carbon of all our flights.

• As an international company, we want to create similar standards for everyone, regardless of location. So, additional perks (for example, a location-aware, fixed amount paid each month to cover costs like co-working, phone contracts or gym memberships), paid parental leave and healthcare compensation are compulsory.

Your Job 

• You are responsible for the success of our product ;) But of course, you are not alone. We currently have 4 PO’s and all team members are engaged in the product process.

• You create, order and validate the list of the work that has to be performed. You decide with the other PO’s what will be developed and when, and make strategic product decisions.

• You manage the Product Backlog of your team and write user stories.

• You communicate a clear vision and help the team to prioritize.

• You participate in all development events (Daily StandUp, Planning, Retrospective, Reviews).

• You do proactive stakeholder management (customer, other PO’s, cross-functional Dev Teams, other internal departments) and gather requirements, manage expectations and set priorities.

• You ensure that our customers are informed about new features (Documentation, Blog posts, Newsletter, just organization, no content creation!).

Why we think this job is worth applying for (challenge us!)

• Impact, Impact, Impact! We are a remote-first organization with a growing team from 15+ European countries. Every new team member changes the team. This is great! People who know things we don’t are highly welcome.

• “It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission” (Grace Hopper) - sure, it’s not 100% like this, but we have a strong culture of failure which, is part of our agile mindset. We don’t do things like in the guidebook. You can try things out! Our default to 100% transparency will help you here.

• We play a key role in our customers' digital transformation. We have partnered up with Amazon and Microsoft to provide our solution on their cloud platforms - more will follow.

• We have been in this ecosystem from the get-go and as part of the CNCF family, we feel at home in the community. As a part of Giant Swarm, you will also join this extended family.

• We serve some of Europe's leading organizations and are talking to many more.

WHY Giant Swarm?

We like to give you a glimpse on how working with is like:

Self-organization

Creative work needs freedom and openness. We encourage you to do your work wherever and whenever you want. We expect passion and encourage sustainability. If you need rest, take it. We don't count holidays - but we are also aware that this combined with remote work can also lead to working too much. So we encourage you to take holidays and help you to manage the freedom and flexibility.

Teamwork

We are a growing company with team members distributed all over Europe and plans on expanding to the US. Our ambitious goals are only achievable as a team. Everybody’s input is highly welcome and appreciated. Although sometimes rules and processes are necessary, we try to keep them as lean as possible. Always question the status quo and find new ways of collaboration and teamwork.

Learning

Learning is mandatory and fun at the same time. If you realize you want to expand your knowledge in a specific area, we support you with conferences, books etc.

Basics

We offer fair (transparent and open) salaries with benefits like choosing your own laptop, additional perks (for example, a location-aware, fixed amount paid each month to cover costs like co-working, phone contracts or gym memberships), paid parental leave and healthcare compensation are compulsory. And you will participate in our stock options program. Currently, our team members have more children than we are employees. So family-friendliness is a must.

We are not hiring job descriptions. We hire humans. :) We welcome applications from everybody, regardless ethnic or national origin, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation or age.

Requirements

• You have at least 3 years of work experience in a tech-driven environment and you know stuff about enterprise software, cloud, open source and distributed systems). You can tell us about your experience with Kubernetes and infrastructure.

• You find the right tone for all stakeholders. Especially with our cross-functional Engineering teams, you are available and engaged. (We are currently building a product where we put customer requirements into product requirements and stories which work for a multitude of customers.)

• You can deal with being empowered to make decisions.

• You understand the market, product, business, and any constraints involved.

• You have an understanding of how our product is developed and delivered, you know a lot about agile methodologies but you don’t need to do everything in the guide book.

• You fight for good UX as this is a huge part of our product.

• You are happy to work in a fast changing environment and adapt the way you work according to the current status of the company. We are operating in the evolving container ecosystem; the whole market is highly volatile.

• You don’t need to be a coder, but a basic knowledge of Linux or a little bit of programming will help you to understand what we are doing.

• Having worked with Kubernetes before is a great plus.

• You have excellent English skills. German is a plus.

• We (and our customers) are currently mostly distributed around Europe (around UTC), thus, you are located in Europe or the North American East Coast.