Technical Product Owner - Omnichannel Fulfillment & Ecommerce

Hello

I hope this email finds you well.

My name is Simran, and I am an IT Recruiter from Empower Professionals Inc. I wanted to reach out regarding a Technical Product Owner - Omnichannel Fulfillment & Ecommerce (244882)

Role: Technical Product Owner - Omnichannel Fulfillment & Ecommerce (244882)

Location: Grand Rapids, MI (Hybrid)

Duration: FTE

Target profile: Senior-level Technical Product Owner with strong ecommerce and omnichannel fulfillment experience who can operate comfortably between business stakeholders, product strategy, and engineering teams. This person should be able to walk in and lead the product backlog and roadmap for Ship-to-Store or similar fulfillment capabilities while participating in technical discussions around architecture and system design.

Must have:

• 7 years in product management or product ownership.
• 3 years in ecommerce, retail technology, or omnichannel fulfillment.
• Proven delivery experience with Ship-to-Store, BOPIS, or similar omnichannel fulfillment capabilities.
• Strong knowledge of event-driven and streaming architecture, specifically Apache Kafka.
• Hands-on familiarity with Microsoft Azure services.
• Strong understanding of the ecommerce technology ecosystem, including OMS, WMS, POS, inventory, payments, and API-first/microservices architecture.
• Experience translating business needs into user stories, acceptance criteria, and technical specifications.
• Strong Agile/Scrum, stakeholder management, and communication skills.
• Niche combination: The strongest candidates combine senior product ownership experience in omnichannel retail fulfillment with enough technical depth in Kafka, Azure, ecommerce integrations, and AI/LLM capabilities to work directly with engineers on technical trade-offs.

Position Overview:

Lead the product strategy and delivery of Ship-to-Store and related omnichannel fulfillment initiatives at the intersection of business strategy and engineering execution. This role translates complex ecommerce and supply chain requirements into a clear, technically sound product roadmap while working directly with engineers and architects on system design trade-offs.

The ideal candidate brings strong product ownership experience along with deep technical fluency across event-driven architecture, cloud platforms, ecommerce systems, and emerging AI capabilities.

Responsibilities:

• Own and prioritize the product backlog for Ship-to-Store and adjacent omnichannel fulfillment initiatives, translating business goals into well-defined epics, features, and user stories.
• Partner with engineering and architecture teams to design scalable, event-driven solutions using Kafka for real-time order, inventory, and fulfillment status updates.
• Define and prioritize the product roadmap in collaboration with stakeholders across merchandising, supply chain, store operations, and customer experience.
• Act as the primary liaison between business stakeholders and engineering, balancing technical feasibility with business value in every sprint.
• Write clear, technically informed acceptance criteria, API contracts, and integration requirements across systems, including OMS, WMS, POS, inventory, and payments.
• Champion the adoption of AI-enabled capabilities, including demand forecasting, intelligent fulfillment routing, and conversational assistants, within the ecommerce roadmap.
• Apply context engineering practices to define how AI/LLM-based features are grounded with the appropriate data, business rules, and system context to produce reliable and explainable outcomes.
• Lead sprint planning, backlog grooming, and release planning in an Agile/Scrum environment.
• Define and track KPIs/OKRs for Ship-to-Store performance, including fulfillment SLA, conversion, cost-to-serve, and order accuracy.
• Ensure solutions are architected for scale, resiliency, and observability on Microsoft Azure.
• Collaborate with UX/design teams to support intuitive and performant experiences for both store associates and customers.
• Manage third-party and vendor integrations, including payment gateways, carrier/logistics providers, and POS vendors.
• Communicate roadmap, risks, and delivery progress to senior leadership and executive stakeholders.

Requirements:

• 7 years of experience in product management or product ownership, including 3 years in ecommerce, retail technology, or omnichannel fulfillment.
• Proven track record delivering Ship-to-Store, Buy-Online-Pickup-In-Store (BOPIS), or similar omnichannel fulfillment capabilities.
• Strong working knowledge of event-driven/streaming architectures, specifically Apache Kafka, including topics, producers/consumers, schema registry, and event-sourcing patterns.
• Hands-on familiarity with Microsoft Azure services, including Azure Functions, AKS, Service Bus, Event Hubs, API Management, and Azure Data Factory/Synapse.
• Practical understanding of AI/ML concepts and applied ecommerce use cases, including personalization, forecasting, recommendation engines, and generative AI.
• Working knowledge of context engineering, including designing prompts, retrieval pipelines (RAG), and grounding strategies for LLM-based features.
• Deep understanding of the ecommerce technology landscape, including OMS, WMS, PIM, CMS, POS, payment gateways, inventory/allocation engines, and API-first/microservices architecture.
• Demonstrated experience writing user stories, acceptance criteria, and technical specifications for engineering teams.
• Strong Agile/Scrum experience, including backlog management tools such as Jira or Azure DevOps.
• Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills, with the ability to translate technical concepts for non-technical audiences and business context for engineer.