Our Company
NEP Group is a world leader in live and broadcast production services, supporting premier events across sports, entertainment, and live events. Our teams design and deliver cutting‐edge technical solutions that bring content to audiences worldwide. Within NEP, the TFC team plays a critical role in orchestrating complex multi‐platform workflows, ensuring seamless integration between technology, operations and clients.
The position
As the Product Owner for Shift, NEP's next‐generation software‐defined networking (SDN) and orchestration program, you will own the product backlog and delivery of the platform capabilities that enable real‐time broadcast network fabrics, cloud‐native infrastructure, and wide‐area production environments. The overall product vision and strategic direction for Shift is owned by the VP, Platform Infrastructure & Networking; you will support this vision by translating priorities into clear user stories, driving alignment across teams, and ensuring production‐grade releases that are operable in the field. The product vision for Platform Infrastructure (reliability, security, automation, Kubernetes platform services, and operational tooling) is owned by the Team Lead – Platform Infrastructure & Security; you will support this vision by shaping requirements, prioritising work, and coordinating delivery across infrastructure and engineering teams.
Key Responsibilities
* Support the VP, Platform Infrastructure & Networking in defining and communicating the Shift product vision and high‐level roadmap, including preparing options, trade‐offs, and stakeholder input to inform decisions.
* Support the Team Lead – Platform Infrastructure & Security in defining and communicating the Platform Infrastructure product vision (reliability, security, automation, Kubernetes platform services, and operational tooling), translating that vision into deliverable backlog items, acceptance criteria, and measurable operational outcomes.
* Maintain a delivery‐level roadmap and release view that reflects the VP's strategic direction; identify and validate problems to solve across media fabric, data centre, and WAN domains, balancing near‐term delivery with long‐term platform evolution.
* Track industry and technology trends relevant to SDN, orchestration, and broadcast/IP workflows, and propose roadmap inputs that improve reliability, developer experience, and operational outcomes.
Backlog Ownership And Requirements Definition
* Create, refine, and prioritize a single product backlog covering Shift platform features, integrations, and technical enablement work.
* Write user stories and acceptance criteria that are testable and unambiguous, including API behaviours, telemetry/observability needs, and operational workflows.
* Ensure the engineering teams have clear priorities and definition‐of‐done for each backlog item; remove ambiguity quickly during delivery.
Cross‐functional stakeholder collaboration
* Act as the primary liaison between Product Management, Platform Architecture, and engineering teams delivering Shift capabilities.
* Coordinate dependencies across orchestration, networking, and platform infrastructure teams; drive alignment on interfaces, responsibilities, and sequencing.
* Engage commissioning and support teams to capture operational feedback, convert learnings into backlog improvements, and ensure field readiness.
Technical product ownership for SDN & orchestration
* Guide feature definition for control‐plane services, policy‐driven automation, and API‐driven orchestration hooks used to manage network services and device lifecycles.
* Collaborate with networking engineers to shape support for protocols and capabilities (e.g., routing, segment routing, path computation, multicast/P2MP services) where they impact the product roadmap.
* Partner with engineering on the evolution of Shift's cloud‐native architecture (microservices, container orchestration, CI/CD) and ensure requirements reflect reliability, security, and performance needs.
Platform infrastructure, reliability, and security enablement
* Partner with the Platform Infrastructure & Security team (Team Lead, Automation Engineers, and SREs) to capture and prioritise the infrastructure work required to deliver and operate Shift across hybrid environments (on‐premise and AWS/GCP), supporting the Team Lead's infrastructure product vision.
* Ensure backlog items include platform foundations such as environment provisioning, infrastructure‐as‐code modules, GitOps workflows, CI/CD pipeline enablement, and automated integration/validation where needed.
* Work with infrastructure stakeholders to define non‐functional requirements and acceptance criteria for reliability, scalability, security, and recoverability (e.g., observability, RBAC/policy controls, vulnerability remediation inputs, performance and resilience testing).
* Coordinate operational readiness for releases, including dashboards/alerts, runbooks, incident response workflows, and support/commissioning handover requirements.
* Participate in post‐incident reviews with engineering and infrastructure teams and ensure actions are captured, prioritised, and tracked through to completion.
Agile delivery, planning, and release management
* Work with the Scrum Master and engineering leads to run effective refinement, sprint planning, reviews, and retrospectives.
* Plan and manage releases, ensuring scope and sequencing are understood and that delivery meets quality, documentation, and operational readiness expectations.
* Maintain transparent progress reporting, risks, and trade‐offs; proactively surface issues that impact schedule or outcomes.
Customer, field support, and operational excellence
* Serve as an escalation point for critical defects and integration issues; lead triage, prioritization, and communication of resolution plans.
* Define and monitor product performance indicators (e.g., delivery predictability, defect escape rate, platform adoption, reliability/availability signals) and drive continuous improvement.
* Ensure documentation is maintained (API references, user guides, runbooks as appropriate) and deliver regular demos/training to engineering, support, and other internal teams.
Required Skills And Attributes
* 3+ years' experience as a Product Owner or Product Manager in a software environment, with proven backlog ownership and delivery outcomes.
* Strong understanding of Agile delivery practices (Scrum or Kanban) and the ability to lead effective refinement and prioritization.
* Technical fluency with API‐first products, microservices, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and core DevOps/SRE practices (infrastructure‐as‐code and observability).
* Working knowledge of networking and SDN concepts (control plane, automation, telemetry/observability) and the ability to translate technical requirements into clear stories.
* Excellent written and verbal communication skills; strong stakeholder management and the ability to negotiate priorities across teams.
Benefits
* Salary continuance insurance
* NEP Days – additional 5 days of leave per year (conditions apply)
* NEP Travel benefits & discounts including Qantas Club Membership
* Discounts through Employment Hero Work app
* Employee Assistance Program
This is a full‐time role and is a unique opportunity for the right person.
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