Product Owner

About the role

This is a 6–12 month contract (with possible extension) for a US‑based client. The contractor works remotely from Mexico, Brazil or Argentina and must be available for US Central Time core hours, with flexibility around critical releases. The pay rate is $20–$35 USD per hour. The team operates in English, so professional fluency in English is required.

The client is an established US‑based company providing billing, payroll and compliance technology to large enterprise customers. They are replacing an existing product with a new AI‑native platform and need a product lead to take it from prototype to full production release.

Role Overview: You will own product for the new platform end‑to‑end, reporting to a senior executive. You'll shape the roadmap, close the gaps between prototype and launch, and keep product, delivery and engineering teams aligned. You'll also lead a small quality and compliance team and be the main day‑to‑day product contact for the engineers building the platform.

Responsibilities

• Own the product vision and a living roadmap with quarterly goals and monthly deliverables
• Define MVP scope and priorities using impact and effort frameworks
• Turn business outcomes into PRDs with user stories, flows and security, privacy and performance requirements
• Maintain a single source of truth for requirements, acceptance criteria and change history
• Work daily with an external engineering pod of four and internal engineering leads
• Run backlog grooming, sprint planning and release readiness, cutting scope when needed
• Validate API contracts and data mappings for integrations with payroll, staffing and finance systems
• Hire and manage a QC Lead and two QC Engineers, and set the QA strategy, defect SLAs and go/no-go criteria
• Plan migration, backfill and validation from the existing product's data model
• Work with compliance specialists to build wage and labour compliance rules into the platform
• Own auditability, including logs, lineage and reconciliation views for billing and compliance reporting
• Define alpha, beta, MVP and GA criteria, coordinate phased cutovers, and prepare runbooks and training
• Track post-launch KPIs and lead fast triage and stabilisation

Pay

$20 – $35 USD per hour

Schedule

Full‑time, US Central Time core hours, flexible around critical releases

Requirements

• Proven product management experience taking a product from prototype to production
• Experience writing PRDs, user stories and acceptance criteria
• Hands‑on experience managing engineering backlogs and sprints
• Experience validating APIs and data mappings for system integrations
• Experience leading or building QA/QC functions, including hiring
• Comfort working with compliance‑driven data, billing and reporting
• Familiarity with Jira, Confluence, Figma, GitHub, Postman or Swagger, and Datadog or Grafana