Kubernetes Product Owner

Description:

You will play a central part in shaping and extending our internal developer platform which underpins how engineers build, deploy and operate applications across the organisation. Your decisions will directly influence developer experience, security and scalability.

You will lead a distributed engineering team, support their development, and guide day-to-day technical direction for the platform. You will define and refine the product vision, using customer feedback, stakeholder needs and market insight to set priorities and maintain a clear backlog. The role requires close collaboration with application developers, product owners, security and data teams, and includes contributing to enterprise architecture reviews to maintain engineering quality and compliance.

You will also work closely with our enablement group, who build features and resources that augment the platform and improve the developer experience. You will be a peer within the cloud engineering leads group and partner with the AWS and Azure platform product owners. As the platform expands to support more complex use cases, you will draw on your Kubernetes experience to set architectural direction, challenge technical leads and help them grow.

About You You have strong Kubernetes experience and a solid software engineering background. You can lead technical direction, making architectural decisions that balance competing concerns to fit the context, and you are willing to challenge approaches when needed.

You have experience managing and developing engineers and shape team culture by leading through example. You build teams that take ownership of their systems, and take pride in delivering secure, resilient and reliable services as standard practice. As the platform grows in scope and complexity, you help engineers develop the judgment and confidence needed to support it.

Key Responsibilities

• Act as the accountable lead for delivering secure, automated and commercially viable self service capabilities into the platform.
• Own and evolve the platform roadmap, using developer feedback, surveys and DORA metrics to guide priorities and improve developer experience.
• Build strong relationships across engineering, product and infrastructure teams, helping customers understand and use the platform effectively.
• Review and challenge proposed architectures to ensure they are secure, scalable and consistent, identifying risks and required changes.
• Contribute directly through design reviews and technical deep dives to maintain high engineering standards.
• Advocate for change within FIL Delivery, proposing improvements and agreeing solutions aligned with the Head of Cloud’s strategy.
• Lead a global engineering team, supporting individual growth and collective performance.
• Promote modern engineering practices and drive continual improvement through regular feedback loops.
• Ensure operational readiness and secure by default workflows, embedding policy as code to automate compliance.
• Use practical experience to influence adoption and raise engineering standards across teams.

Experience And Qualifications The ideal candidate will have

• Excellent knowledge of Kubernetes and its ecosystem.
• A strong software engineering background with hands-on experience of cloud technologies.
• Confidence designing and reasoning about systems at scale.
• Strong experience designing and operating Continuous Delivery pipelines.
• Experience leading software engineering teams.
• Confidence owning a product and managing customer engagement.
• Familiarity with Extreme Programming practices, including pairing.
• A practical technical leadership style that supports agile Kanban delivery.
• Ability to solve problems across the stack using structured root cause analysis rather than relying solely on tooling.
• Works transparently, shares knowledge openly and builds strong, collaborative relationships across global teams.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English.