Product Owner Expert - Kubernetes, CaaS Platform

Product Owner Expert

At PNC, our people are our greatest differentiator and competitive advantage in the markets we serve. We are all united in delivering the best experience for our customers. We work together each day to foster an inclusive workplace culture where all of our employees feel respected, valued and have an opportunity to contribute to the company's success.

As a Product Owner Expert within PNC's Technology organization, you can be based Dallas TX, Phoenix AZ, Pittsburgh PA, Strongsville OH or Birmingham AL. PNC will not provide sponsorship for employment visas or participate in STEM OPT for this position.

We are looking for an accomplished and experienced Product Owner Expert to support our Kubernetes CaaS Platform. The successful candidate will be instrumental in shaping the strategic direction, defining the roadmap, and facilitating adoption of container hosting platforms across both on-premises and cloud environments.

A Product Owner Expert is a senior-level role focused on designing, managing, and evolving container-based platforms (Kubernetes ecosystems) as products for internal or external users. This role serves as a link between technical engineering teams and business stakeholders, ensuring scalable infrastructure solutions are developed, launched, and widely adopted while prioritizing user experience.

Key Responsibilities:

• Product Strategy & Roadmap: Establishes the long-term vision, strategic direction, and roadmap for containerized infrastructure and Kubernetes services. Ensures alignment of container strategy with organizational objectives such as scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency. Identifies avenues for platform enhancement and innovation.
• Technical Leadership: Responsible for overseeing the product development process, collaborating with engineering to convert market requirements into technical specifications for container runtime, security, and orchestration. Guarantees developer usability through self-service options, APIs, and clear documentation. Promotes widespread adoption among engineering teams and provides mentorship as well as guidance to engineers.
• Customer & Market Insight: Represents customers, studies industry trends, and informs product development and adoption.
• Performance Optimization: Oversees product metrics to enhance the performance, usability, and reliability of containerized workloads across various environments.
• Architecture & Design: Develop and set standards for container orchestration systems such as Kubernetes. Establish best practices for CI/CD pipelines, Microservices deployment, and Observability—including logging, monitoring, and tracing. Guarantee robust high availability, fault tolerance, and scalability.
• Security & Compliance: Apply container security, scan images, secure runtime, enforce policies, and meet enterprise standards.
• Performance & Cost Optimization: Enhance cluster efficiency and resource management, minimize on-prem / cloud expenses through effective container orchestration, and strengthen system performance and reliability in accordance with SLOs/SLAs.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field (or equivalent experience) preferred

• 7-10 years Relevant Product Management, Product Owner, or Architecture/Software Engineer experience in an agile software product development environment preferred. Advanced level understanding of customer experience

• 10+ years relevant Product Management or Product Owner experience in cloud, infrastructure, or platform engineering domains preferred.

• Experience in Agile software development environments, preferably with developer platform products.

• Strong background in Kubernetes, container orchestration, and DevOps tooling (e.g., Helm, ArgoCD, Jenkins, GitOps).

• Familiarity with cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) and on-prem solutions (OpenShift, bare-metal Kubernetes, etc.)

• Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal, with the ability to present complex technical information to non-technical stakeholders.

• Ability to lead cross-functional teams and manage multiple stakeholders effectively.

Preferred Skills:

• Kubernetes Expertise: Strong understanding of Kubernetes cluster architecture, workload orchestration, networking, RBAC, and security best practices.

• Hybrid-Cloud & On-Prem Platforms: Hands-on knowledge of hybrid and multi-cloud environments and experience integrating Kubernetes with enterprise systems.

• Agile Practices: Deep experience with Agile methodologies and backlog/project management tools (e.g., Jira, Rally, ADO).

Licenses and Certifications:

• Kubernetes certifications (CKA, CKAD, or CKS) strongly preferred

• Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) or SAFe POPM (Preferred)

• Cloud certifications (AWS/Azure/GCP) a plus

PNC will not provide sponsorship for employment visas or participate in STEM OPT for this position.

PNC is an in-office company that fosters a supportive culture where employees can thrive and achieve balance. We encourage candidates to connect with their recruiter and hiring manager to understand workplace expectations and ensure the role aligns with their goals.