Job Title: Technical Product Manager – Cloud Platforms, Observability & DevOps
Location: Remote (DC area preferred) with occasional on-site in Washington, DC, Philadelphia, PA, or Wilmington, DE
Employment Type: Contract (W2 through ZipStaff — No C2C or 1099)
About the Opportunity
ZipStaff is seeking an experienced Technical Product Manager – Cloud Platforms, Observability & DevOps to drive platform strategy and evolution for a major transportation organization.
Operating within the Enterprise Platforms & Enablement portfolio under the Cloud, Observability, Disaster Recovery, and DevOps value stream, this strategic role owns “platform as a product” across complex enterprise cloud ecosystems.
You will serve as the critical bridge between platform strategy and tactical execution, lead Product Owners, and translate business priorities into cohesive, long-term technical roadmaps that elevate system reliability, disaster recovery posture, and continuous delivery capabilities.
What You’ll Do:
- Act as the primary voice of the customer and platform strategy owner, defining and communicating a clear product vision, value stream priorities, and multi-year roadmaps across Cloud, Observability, DR, and DevOps.
- Lead and mentor day-to-day Product Owners within the value stream, ensuring feature backlogs, user stories, and acceptance criteria accurately reflect high-level business goals and technical roadmaps.
- Lead high-level discussions evaluating cloud capabilities, observability tooling, and disaster recovery as an integrated, resilient platform ecosystem rather than isolated silos.
- Drive feature prioritization and release sequencing by balancing business value, technical feasibility, architectural runway, and operational reliability.
- Collaborate with executive leadership, technical architects, engineering teams, and business stakeholders to ensure platform capabilities seamlessly support enterprise digital initiatives and frontline operations.
- Champion Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) principles across Agile Release Trains, facilitating dependency management, PI planning preparation, and continuous delivery alignment.
- Establish and monitor key operational, adoption, and reliability metrics to evaluate platform performance, drive continuous improvement, and guide data-backed product pivots.
Required Qualifications:
- 5+ years of experience as an Agile Product Owner or Product Manager in a large-scale enterprise environment, with a proven track record leading cloud-focused platform initiatives or Cloud Operations teams.
- Strong Platform as a Service (PaaS) background with demonstrated domain expertise spanning cloud architecture (AWS/Azure), end-to-end observability, disaster recovery strategies, and CI/CD DevOps practices.
- SAFe 6.0 Product Owner/Product Manager (POPM) certification OR 3+ years of hands-on experience driving product ownership within a Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) environment.
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Systems Engineering, or a related field; or an equivalent combination of education and applied industry experience.
- Advanced proficiency with enterprise