Senior Product Owner with French

Location: Bucharest, Romania

The Company: Thales, a global technology giant, stands out in the Defence & Security, Aeronautics & Space, and Cybersecurity & Digital Identity sectors. With an annual investment of nearly 4 billion euros in Research & Development, Thales positions itself at the forefront of innovation in key areas such as artificial intelligence (AI), quantum technology, and cybersecurity. The group employs 81,000 people across 68 countries and generated revenues of 18.4 billion euros in 2023.

Mission: Join us in building the future of engineering productivity. We're creating a ground-breaking agent garden that will transform how 40,000+ engineers work—enabling seamless connections between AI systems, engineering tools, and data while fostering a thriving marketplace of AI agents and services.

Main Responsibilities

In collaboration with the CPO and other Tribe POs

• Identify and map stakeholders, understand their needs, and proactively manage their expectations, potential risks and issues, implementing appropriate and effective solutions.
• Define and maintain a clear product vision and roadmap for the tooling layer of the Lewis Engineering Agentic AI (LEA) team.
• Own the backlog for tool evolution, upgrades, usage policies, integration capabilities, and support processes.
• Discuss new functionality and its business value with stakeholders.
• Translate user needs into clear and actionable user stories for the development team.
• Prioritize the product backlog based on value, ensuring the delivery of essential features.
• Collaborate with all stakeholders to ensure engagement and satisfaction throughout the product lifecycle.

In collaboration with the EDM and other Tribe POs

• Plan the releases.
• Facilitate tool upgrades, migrations, and deprecation strategies in a scalable and non-disruptive way.
• Regularly communicate product status and release progress through our backlog management tool.
• Share needs, capacity plans, and training requirements with the EDM, and establish budget projections with the PM to meet both corporate and engineering needs and ensure that the product vision remains aligned with the LEA Team strategy.

In collaboration with Tribe Coaches

• Align tools configuration and lifecycle management with Data best practices.
• Monitor usage, performance, and reliability of tools and manage continuous improvement.
• Ensure self-service capabilities (e.g., project bootstrap, quality gates, artifact promotion, pipeline templates).
• Define usage standards and implement guardrails to ensure secure and efficient use of tools.
• Other Responsibilities

Collaborate with UX leads to improve the developer experience across tools.

Be a point of contact for audits, compliance needs, and licensing governance related to the toolchain.

Who Are You?

Technical Expertise

• Understanding of data design, quality, observability, lineage, and metadata management practices.
• Experience managing or integrating tools such as DataFlow, Apache Beam, BigQuery, and databases.
• Experience with cloud data platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP), with GCP being highly desirable.
• Familiarity with DevOps/CI-CD practices and infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, CloudFormation).

Product & UX Mindset

• Experience in managing product strategy, with internal products/platform components being a plus.
• Strategic thinking to identify trends and hidden needs, align product vision with company strategy, and manage product development and deployment in a domain where change and transformation are needed, including proof of concepts, pilots, MVPs, and adoption curves.
• Ability to drive adoption and improve the usability of technical tools.
• Familiarity with developer experience concepts and self-service platform patterns.
• Ability to track product KPIs such as tool adoption, developer satisfaction, MTTR, and failure rates.
• Data-driven approach, utilizing metrics such as acquisition and activation metrics, Net Promoter Score, User Experience Questionnaire, and burndown charts.

Soft Skills

• Strong communication, coordination, and facilitation skills across silos (Data, AI, DevOps, Ops), with the ability to align and engage stakeholders remotely across worldwide teams.
• Pragmatic and value-driven mindset.
• Analytical, structured, and prioritization-oriented.
• Leadership without authority, with the ability to influence technical decisions through product framing.
• Deep understanding of skill management and skill-based activities for engineering topics.
• Excellent stakeholder management and negotiation skills at all levels, including executive management.
• Certification in Product Management (e.g., Professional Scrum Product Owner).
• Fluent in English.
• French is mandatory.

At Thales, we’re committed to fostering a workplace where respect, trust, collaboration, and passion drive everything we do. Here, you’ll feel empowered to bring your best self, thrive in a supportive culture, and love the work you do. Join us, and be part of a team reimagining technology to create solutions that truly make a difference – for a safer, greener, and more inclusive world.

Thales is a global technology leader trusted by governments, institutions, and enterprises to tackle their most demanding challenges. From quantum applications and artificial intelligence to cybersecurity and 6G innovation, our solutions empower critical decisions rooted in human intelligence. Operating at the forefront of defence and security, aerospace and space, cybersecurity and digital identity, we’re driven by a mission to build a future we can all trust.

 

In Romania, we are advancing innovation through software engineering, research and development, delivering solutions in key markets in which Thales Group operates. Our engineers design, develop and integrate solutions that impact global industries – from fully operational systems and subsystems for naval warfare and maritime security operations, to air traffic management systems, satellite-based solutions, tactical indoor simulations, identity and biometric technologies and more.