Engineering Product Owner

About the Role

The Engineering Product Owner at ZEISS India drives product lifecycle initiatives, sustaining engineering, and product enhancements for critical update systems and connectivity platforms. This role acts as a bridge between Product Management and Engineering, combining strong product ownership with deep software engineering experience. The incumbent will actively contribute to architecture discussions, technical design, troubleshooting, code reviews, prototyping, and software implementation when required.

Key Responsibilities

• Lifecycle Ownership and Installed-Base Improvements
• Define, prioritize, and manage product enhancements, defect fixes, cybersecurity improvements, and technical debt initiatives.
• Translate field feedback, complaint trends, CAPA inputs, service data, customer needs, and product priorities into clear lifecycle scope, milestones, risks, and success criteria.
• Translate customer, service, quality, and regulatory requirements into actionable development backlogs.
• Own the lifecycle and sustaining engineering backlog.
• Own engineering coordination for lifecycle initiatives, installed-base enhancements, technical escalations, issue resolution, upgrades, and end-of-life actions.
• Drive lifecycle planning, upgrade strategies, compatibility management, and end-of-life activities.
• Coordinate cross-functional execution across Product Management, Engineering, Quality, Regulatory, Service, and Operations teams.
• Technical Leadership & Engineering Contribution
• Leverage prior software development experience to make informed product and technical decisions.
• Collaborate with architects and development teams on solution design and implementation strategies.
• Review technical designs, APIs, architecture proposals, and code changes.
• Participate in troubleshooting, root-cause analysis, and resolution of complex technical issues.
• Contribute hands-on to software development, technical prototyping, automation, debugging, or proof-of-concept implementation when required, while maintaining primary accountability for product ownership and lifecycle execution.
• Ensure technical feasibility and architectural alignment of backlog items.
• Requirement Engineering and Backlog Ownership
• Lead end-to-end requirement engineering considering system functional and non-functional requirements, including elicitation, analysis, refinement, validation, signoff, and audit-ready documentation.
• Convert high-level business, clinical, user, and technical needs into clear functional and non-functional requirements, user stories, acceptance criteria, and definition-of-ready expectations.
• Maintain feature-to-user-story-to-acceptance-criteria traceability and ensure alignment with product intent, risk controls, verification strategy, design-transfer impact, and QMS expectations.
• Own and prioritize the product/lifecycle backlog by balancing customer value, regulatory commitments, technical debt, security, usability, resource constraints, and delivery priorities.
• UX, Software Delivery, and Agile Execution
• Collaborate with UX/UI, software, systems, architecture, test, and service teams to ensure requirements translate into feasible, user-centric, secure, and scalable solutions.
• Create or review mockups, wireframes, screen flows, usability feedback, and workflow alignment before development where applicable.
• Provide inputs for Agile ceremonies, sprint/program planning, backlog refinement, dependency resolution, MVP definition, roadmap planning, and release readiness.
• Lead backlog grooming, sprint planning, and requirement clarification sessions.
• Quality, Regulatory, Risk, and Compliance
• Ensure lifecycle decisions are supported by documented rationale, traceable inputs, impact analysis, verification evidence, and appropriate quality records.
• Partner with quality and regulatory teams on investigations, CAPA actions, risk management, hazard analysis, defect management, validation needs, privacy/security considerations, and release constraints.
• Stakeholder Leadership and Decision Support
• Act as the central engineering interface between product management, business stakeholders, engineering teams, quality, regulatory, service, manufacturing, commercial, regional teams, suppliers, and external partners.
• Communicate priorities, progress, risks, trade-offs, decision needs, and customer impact through concise dashboards, reviews, metrics, and leadership updates.
• Use data-driven analysis to support prioritization, product maintenance decisions, troubleshooting, resource and budget planning, and continuous improvement.
• Innovation and Emerging Technologies
• Stay current with technology and industry trends and work with technical teams to introduce practical innovations that improve product outcomes and future readiness.
• Identify opportunities to leverage AI/ML-enabled product capabilities and AI tools for requirement analysis, documentation efficiency, product insights, and user experience improvement.

Requirements & Tech Stack

• Working knowledge of applicable medical-device software lifecycle, quality, risk-management, cybersecurity, privacy, and design-control requirements, including IEC 62304, ISO 13485, ISO 14971, and relevant regulatory expectations, as applicable to the product.
• Demonstrated ability to contribute hands-on to software development, technical prototyping, automation, debugging, or proof-of-concept implementation.
• Experience in AI/ML-enabled product capabilities and AI tools.

Qualifications

• Strong product ownership with deep software-engineering experience.