Product Owner

Own the backlog. Keep delivery moving. Make daily prioritisation calls across product, service design, engineering and clients.

About the role

This is an operational product ownership role. You'll own the day-to-day running of the backlog, keep delivery moving, and make sure the engineering team always has clear, well-defined work in front of them.

You'll sit inside the delivery team, attend standups, run refinement sessions, write stories, resolve blockers, and make the decisions that keep sprints on track. You'll be the person engineering turns to when something is unclear, and the person who ensures that what gets built reflects what users and clients need.

The role sits at the intersection of service design, engineering and client delivery. You'll work closely with our CTO to shape and prioritise the backlog, and with the engineering team to ensure those items are well-scoped, understood, and deliverable.

What you'll do

• Own and maintain the product backlog — groomed, prioritised, and ready for delivery at all times.
• Write and refine user stories with clear, testable acceptance criteria.
• Run and facilitate backlog refinement, sprint planning, and sprint review sessions.
• Work with engineering daily to clarify requirements, unblock delivery, and support sprint execution.
• Triage incoming requests from clients and internal teams and translate them into well-defined backlog items.
• Work with service designers and user researchers to ensure delivery is grounded in user needs and service evidence.
• Distinguish between product configuration choices, service design issues, policy constraints, and engineering decisions.
• Manage and communicate sprint progress clearly to the wider team and to clients.
• Support testing and acceptance of completed work before release.
• Flag risks, dependencies, and scope creep early and clearly.

What we're looking for

• Proven experience owning a backlog in an active agile delivery team.
• The ability to write clear, well-scoped user stories that engineers can act on without ambiguity.
• Strong facilitation skills for refinement, planning, and review ceremonies.
• Comfort making day-to-day prioritisation decisions under competing pressures.
• Strong communication skills with both technical and non-technical colleagues and clients.
• An organised, dependable working style — things don't fall through the gaps.
• The ability to work across product, service design, engineering and client teams without losing focus on delivery.
• Experience with Scottish Government, local government, UK public services, regulated services, GovTech delivery, or digital licensing and permitting is particularly valuable.

The hiring process

• 01Online get-to-know-each-other call30 min
• 02Online tech test40 min – 1 hr max
• 03Face-to-face final interviewEdinburgh

What we offer

• 30 days holiday. Plus your birthday off, a day dedicated to you for cake and candles.
• Hybrid working. Two days a week at our Leith office on Commercial Quay. Three wherever you do your best work.
• Enhanced maternity / paternity leave. Paid leave for primary and secondary carers, because the people who matter at home matter here too.
• Company pension. Employer contributions from day one.
• Training and development. Conference budget, training budget, and an equipment allowance. Tell us what makes you better at your craft and we'll back it.
• Company meet-ups. Strategy days, team socials, the occasional pub quiz. Less mandatory fun, more actual fun.
• Impact-led work. The infrastructure you build here runs live public services. Not just a mission statement, it's just what Tuesday looks like.
• Modern, well-maintained codebase. Laravel 12, React 19, TypeScript, PHPStan at high levels, Pest 4, Rector. We pay down debt and we embrace AI across the stack, but we hire for Authentic Intelligence — your judgment, your craft, AI as the accelerant.

Eligibility & inclusion

Because ePass operates in a regulated environment on behalf of the Scottish Government, the successful candidate must have the right to work in the UK and be willing to complete standard pre-employment background screening (for example Baseline Personnel Security Standard or Disclosure Scotland checks, where required).

We're committed to building an inclusive team and welcome applications from people of all backgrounds. If you need any reasonable adjustments to take part in our interview process, just let us know what would help and we'll make it work.