Job Title: Technical Product Owner – Payments

Location: Remote (U.S.)

Employment Type: Contract (W2 through ZipStaff — No C2C or 1099)

About the Opportunity

ZipStaff is seeking a Technical Product Owner for the payments team at a major retail organization. You will own backlog clarity, acceptance criteria, and delivery decisions for one or more services in the tender, authorization, capture, and settlement flow for digital orders — credit, mobile wallets, and government benefit tenders (SNAP, WIC). You will work with engineers and architects already on the team. This is a technical delivery seat, not a business analyst role and not a project coordinator role.

What You’ll Do:

• Translate business and compliance needs into features, stories, and testable acceptance criteria for payment and tender flows.
• Own backlog order, readiness, and priority calls so delivery keeps moving.
• Build enough understanding of the payment pipeline — tender selection, authorization and capture, tokenization, partial and split capture, government benefit handling — to make tradeoffs with engineering.
• Partner with engineers and architects on discovery without dictating implementation.
• Validate delivered work against acceptance criteria, including testing across tender types.
• Own release readiness for payment changes: what is shipping, monitoring and rollback, and go-live communication.
• Support production issue triage with engineering.
• Work in the team’s SAFe Agile ceremonies.

Required Qualifications:

• 5+ years as a Technical Product Owner or Product Owner on a software delivery team (Agile / SAFe) — not only a business analyst or project coordinator.
• Clear, testable acceptance criteria and features broken into right-sized stories.
• Comfortable discussing APIs, data flows, and system integrations with engineers — enough depth to ask the right questions and make scope tradeoffs.
• Owned a backlog for a service with real production usage.
• Strong written and verbal communication between engineering and business or compliance stakeholders.
• Must be legally authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship now or in the future.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Prior software engineering, architecture, or payments subject-matter experience.
• Payments, order management, e-commerce checkout, or financial transaction systems.
• Event-driven or workflow systems (Temporal, Kafka, GCP).
• PCI, tokenization, or payment-compliance exposure.
• Retail or e-commerce order flows (pickup, delivery, marketplace, subscriptions).

Benefits:

• Health Insurance.
• Dental Insurance.
• Vision Insurance.
• 401(k) + 401(k) matching.
• Paid time off.
• Referral Program.

About ZipStaff

ZipStaff partners with leading organizations to connect skilled technology professionals with high-impact contract opportunities. We focus on quality matches, clear communication, and long-term success for candidates and clients. To apply, submit your resume highlighting backlogs you owned, acceptance criteria you wrote, and production services you supported. Résumés that only say “coordinated,” “scheduled,” or “tracked status” will not be considered.