Data Platform Product Owner

Location: Centurion (Hybrid) | Contract Duration: 12 Months | Industry: Financial Services

The Role

Our client is seeking a highly skilled Data Platform Product Owner for a high-impact 12-month contract. This is not a traditional reporting, business intelligence, or analytics Product Owner role. The successful candidate will operate within a complex enterprise data ecosystem and will hold operational ownership, driving the prioritisation, optimisation, scalability, and continuous improvement of enterprise data platform capabilities.

This role requires a candidate who demonstrates exceptional Product Ownership maturity combined with a deep understanding of cloud-native data environments and platform-as-a-product thinking. You will act as the vital link ensuring that platform services remain secure, governed, operationally reliable, and easily consumable across the enterprise to enable AI, analytics, and data-driven decision-making.

Key Responsibilities

• Own and prioritise enterprise data platform backlogs and capability roadmaps.
• Support platform evolution across modern cloud-native data ecosystems.
• Collaborate closely with Data Engineering, Analytics, Cloud, Security, Governance, and Architecture teams.
• Translate complex business, analytics, and AI requirements into clear, prioritised platform capabilities.
• Support scalable, secure, governed, and resilient platform delivery.
• Drive backlog refinement, prioritisation, and operational readiness alignment.
• Support self-service analytics enablement and platform adoption initiatives across the organisation.
• Monitor and assess platform maturity, operational performance, and business value outcomes.
• Contribute actively to platform governance, reliability, automation, and FinOps / cost optimisation initiatives.

• Proven experience in Product Ownership or Platform Product Management within a complex enterprise or regulated environment.
• Direct experience operating within enterprise data platform, platform engineering, cloud data, or analytics enablement environments (rather than purely reporting or business analysis functions).
• Strong backlog ownership and prioritisation capability with engineering-led delivery teams.
• Solid understanding of Agile delivery, DevOps practices, and platform operations.
• Strong stakeholder engagement and communication capability with true lifecycle accountability.
• Ability to balance scalability, governance, and operational reliability with business value.
• Exposure to cloud-native data ecosystems and platforms such as Databricks, Snowflake, Azure Data Factory, or Data Lakes / Lakehouse platforms is highly advantageous.
• Familiarity with Power BI, SQL, Streaming Platforms, Data Governance & Lineage tooling, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), or Platform Observability is preferred.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Data Science, or a related field is preferred.
• Relevant Product Owner certifications (e.g., CSPO, PSPO) or cloud platform certifications are highly advantageous.

• A competitive market-related contract rate.
• A collaborative and forward-thinking hybrid work environment (3 days on-site in Centurion, 2 days remote).
• Direct exposure to large-scale enterprise automation, modern platform engineering, and advanced data architecture.