Product Owner - MongoDB Data Platform Engagement (3-month Contract)

gravity9 is a boutique IT consulting company headquartered in the UK with offices in the US, Canada, Poland, and Colombia. Our team has deep experience in engineering, experience design and product management. We enjoy a challenge and pride ourselves on working with our clients on their most complex problems, finding elegant and flexible solutions that help them transform their businesses. The Role, Honestly We're building a metadata-driven data platform on MongoDB Atlas for an enterprise client migrating off legacy relational systems. Today, standing up a single data product on the client's side takes close to a year, because integration logic is hardcoded per product with no reuse. We're building the platform that changes that: a canonical transformer, a metadata registry of reusable "recipes," a pipeline engine that generates deployable code from those recipes, and an API service — all in Java and Spring Boot, fully additive to the client's existing systems. This is a compressed, high-visibility build. You'll work alongside a Solutions Architect, a Project Manager, and a delivery team of at least three developers and a QA engineer. You'll be the person who keeps the backlog, the requirements, and the stakeholders pointed at the same outcome — close enough to the technical detail (JSON, data models, versioning logic, API contracts) to write specs the engineering team can build against directly. What You’ll Actually Do • Own and prioritize the delivery backlog across the platform's core components — the canonical transformer, the metadata registry, the pipeline engine, conditional external-source connectors, and the API service — and keep it sequenced against a fixed multi-week delivery timeline. • Turn business need into buildable spec: translate client requirements into clear recipes for the metadata registry, user stories, and acceptance criteria the delivery team can build against — not just a written spec, but something you stay accountable for through to shipped software. • Run schema and requirements sessions with the client's domain owners to nail down version-selection rules, deduplication criteria, and join logic for the canonical transformer — this is where most of the engagement's real decisions get made, early in the timeline. • Drive open design decisions that are still unresolved at kickoff — for example how access is filtered by requester role, and how a batch-delivered external data source gets ingested — facilitating alignment between stakeholders who haven't yet agreed, and making the call when they can't. • Track scope discipline: the engagement is bounded to a defined set of API queries, no new technology introductions, and additive changes only on the read side. Know the in-scope/out-of-scope lines cold and catch scope creep before it becomes a timeline problem. • Own the risk and dependency log, especially the load-bearing ones — upstream data-migration timelines, environment access, and client-owned DevOps support for deployment — and escalate early rather than let them surface as late surprises. • Coordinate a multi-stage delivery approach (discovery and design, build and integrate, validate and transfer) so work legitimately overlaps without stepping on itself — build starts on well-scoped pieces before design fully closes, and that only works if the backlog reflects it. • Work day-to-day with the development and QA team: groom the backlog, run or support Agile ceremonies, unblock developers, and coordinate testing so the platform gets validated against real data before handoff. • Partner closely with the Solutions Architect and Project Manager as the product owner of a small, high-trust core team — translating architectural decisions into a sequenced, buildable plan. • Represent the platform's downstream consumers who aren't in the room, and make sure the API service and materialized views actually serve what they need. • Plan and drive knowledge transfer so that by the end of the contract, the client's own team can extend the platform and author new recipes without you. • Communicate constantly and clearly across a distributed delivery team and client stakeholders, being deliberate about handoffs and written status given time-zone overlap. What You’ll Need • 5+ years as a Product Owner or Product Manager on Agile technical or platform-engineering engagements — not primarily consumer feature teams. You should be as comfortable owning a data platform backlog as a product roadmap. • Technical fluency with data platforms: comfortable reading JSON payloads, API contracts, and data models; conversant in concepts like CDC (change data capture), metadata-driven architecture, versioning/deduplication logic, and CQRS well enough to write recipes and specs the engineering team can build from directly. • MongoDB or NoSQL data-platform experience strongly preferred — ideally on an engagement involving materialized views, canonical data models, or multi-source data reconciliation. • Familiarity with Java / Spring Boot delivery environments a plus — you won't be writing code, but you need to speak the engineering team's language in daily conversation. • Enterprise or regulated-industry delivery experience strongly preferred — this engagement runs inside a large client's existing compliance, security, and architectural constraints, and that context matters. • A track record of driving unresolved decisions to closure — this role inherits open design decisions on day one, between client stakeholders who haven't yet aligned internally. • Strong Agile fundamentals: backlog ownership, sprint ceremonies, and estimation, with hands-on tool experience (Jira, Azure DevOps, or similar), and comfort managing a multi-developer, multi-QA delivery team. • Excellent written and verbal communication, with real experience working across time zones on a distributed delivery team alongside senior client stakeholders. You’ll Thrive If You • Can hold a business outcome and a data model in your head in the same conversation. • Are comfortable owning outcomes for a small, senior core team rather than a large program office. • Treat an unresolved design decision as something to go drive to closure, not something to escalate and wait on. • Can walk into a room with a technical architect and domain SMEs and hold your own on schema and versioning questions. • Are energized by a hard deadline and a compressed, high-visibility build. This Isn’t Probably a Fit For You If • You want a backlog that's already been scoped and handed to you. • You'd rather stay one level removed from the technical detail. • You need a large, established program structure before you're comfortable owning outcomes. Contract Details • Duration: 3 months, with potential for extension into follow-on platform work. • Location: Remote, must be based in the United States and able to work substantial overlap with a distributed delivery team and client stakeholders. • Team: you'll join a Solutions Architect, a Project Manager, at least three developers, and a QA engineer on this engagement.