Technical Product Owner - API Specialist

Job Summary

The Technical Product Owner – API Specialist (API TPO) is a key enabler of the API Hub operating model. This role acts as the single point of coordination between strategy and execution, supporting the API Technical Manager in driving the API Hub roadmap, managing dependencies, and ensuring consistent delivery across portfolios. The API TPO ensures that API initiatives are well-prioritized, technically sound, and aligned with enterprise standards, while also serving as the primary SPOC for API stakeholders, communities, and enablement activities.

In this role, you will:

• Be responsible for the story content, acceptance criteria definition, and end story “sign off’ across team backlogs, ensuring user stories are prepared on time for future PI’s, refined frequently with the entire team, and prioritised accordingly in alignment with other team backlogs.
• Ensure Technical Debt and non-functional requirements are captured, refined, and prioritised across all sprints.
• Capture additional BAU, Ceremony, and Spike activities, and incorporate into team backlogs, within the boundaries of available capacity.
• Prepare contribution to PI demo, in conjunction with other applicable Product Owners.
• Maintain the quality and integrity of features within their technical and team boundaries, ensuring identification and contribution of risks and dependencies back to the Product Portfolio backlog.
• Attend and contribute to key Product Management meetings, in particular PI Planning.
• Define metrics to measure the success and performance of prioritised work, ensuring any further BAU iterations can be proposed and prioritised accordingly within the boundaries of available capacity.
• Participate in establishing and growing a community of Product Owners, building an identity for the role, focus upon collaboration, and identifying opportunities for improvement and growth.
• Contribute to the Product Management Communities and their continual evolution to help drive efficient practices and empowered teams.
• Be working with your team(s) to identify and capture team driven innovation ideas, consolidating across peer group for playback up to TPM (Technical Product Manager) community.

Qualification

To be considered for the role, you must meet the below requirements:

• Degree or Honours (12+3) in IT.
• 5+ years of total experience in Information Technology including 2+ years practical experience of working as a Product Owner/Manager, in a team facing capacity, with proven record of driving discernible change and delivery, at pace.

Knowledge/Skills:

• Operations Research, Marketing science, Information Systems, e-Commerce or a combination of industry certification.
• Global Product (CSPO/SAFe/PSPO) trained and certified.
• Whilst not essential, some experience of working within a Scaled Agile framework, across multiple initiatives and circa 50+ teams.
• Demonstrated technical or domain expertise, utilising a depth and breadth of knowledge and practical experience within the specific domain or technical area. Stays up to date with regulatory and other changes in the technical area, and understands how they apply to the Emirates group.
• Well-versed with the tools for the Product Management aspects of software delivery.
• Strong and concise communicator at peer, line, and stakeholder levels.
• Builds strong relationships with peers and team members.
• Appetite for building and identifying value, with a customer centric mind-set.
• Strong understanding of:
• API-first & API-as-a-Product concepts
• REST / Async APIs, OpenAPI, event-driven patterns
• API lifecycle: master all the API Stage to ensure governance
• Familiarity with:
• API Gateways & platforms (Kong API Gateway is a Nice to Have)
• Developer Portals & API catalogues: familiar with API Developer Experience
• CI/CD, automation, and platform engineering concepts : Gitlab CI / Artifactory/Nexus/Docker/Terraform/Ansible
• Solid grasp of API Security by Design principles: OWASP10-2025
• Have experience contributing to an API program on a large scale.