About Mars
Mars is a family-owned business with over $50 billion in global sales, operating in more than 80 countries and powered by over 150,000 Associates worldwide. Guided by our Five Principles—Quality, Responsibility, Mutuality, Efficiency, and Freedom—we are transforming the way we operate through an ambitious Digital Core programme, modernizing our global technology landscape and driving operational excellence at enterprise scale.
Role Summary
As the AIOps Product Owner & Squad Lead, you will play a pivotal role in maximizing business value across the Enterprise Intelligence Center. You will own the strategic roadmap, delivery lifecycle, and adoption of our enterprise AIOps and full-stack observability platforms. Leading an agile squad alongside strategic partner teams, you will champion automated "self-healing" operations, drive incident reduction, and translate complex observability metrics into measurable business outcomes.
- Product & Agile Leadership: Product Ownership (CSPO/PSPO), Agile and Scrum ceremonies, backlog prioritization, squad leadership, and strategic roadmap definition.
- AIOps & Observability: Full-stack observability, AI/ML in IT operations, telemetry (logs, metrics, traces), incident management, and MTTR reduction.
- Automation & Reliability: Proactive self-healing architectures, event correlation, operational excellence, and capacity and performance auditing.
- Financial & Governance: Cloud FinOps (cost optimization, platform consumption, utilization tracking), and SLA/SLO/KPI monitoring.
- Stakeholder & Vendor Management: Technical vendor governance, cross-functional alignment, partner enablement, and technical documentation.
Key Responsibilities
1. Agile Squad Leadership & Delivery Cadence
- Serve as the dedicated Squad Lead and Product Owner, managing and grooming the program backlog to align directly with strategic enterprise objectives.
- Drive disciplined sprint execution with a target release cadence of every two weeks, ensuring high-quality, predictable feature increments.
- Lead standard Agile ceremonies (backlog refinement, sprint planning, daily stand-ups, retrospectives) and drive continuous experimentation to improve team velocity.
- Coordinate cross-team dependencies and resolve blockers across partner delivery teams and internal engineering groups.
2. Strategic Product Vision & Observability Lifecycle
- Own the end-to-end product lifecycle—from discovery and design through deployment, continuous auditing, and optimization.
- Bridge the gap between technical metrics and executive impact: translate full-stack infrastructure telemetry into transparent business process KPIs.
- Partner closely with Evolution, Governance, and Platform teams to define, maintain, and audit product performance, capacity, and security standards.
3. Automation, "Self-Healing" & Operational Excellence
- Champion the "Self-Healing" roadmap, actively identifying, prioritizing, and delivering automation initiatives that proactively eliminate manual touchpoints.
- Drive tangible operational improvements by reducing Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) and eliminating recurring reported incidents.
- Monitor industry trends, modern AI/ML tooling, and next-generation observability capabilities to continuously evolve the product roadmap.
4. FinOps, Vendor Governance & Stakeholder Adoption
- Support the FinOps process, monitoring consumption, cost efficiency, and maximizing ROI on our AIOps platform investments.
- Oversee and evaluate third-party technology vendors and delivery partners, holding them accountable to operational deliverables and contractual SLAs.
- Partner across global business units to drive enterprise-wide platform adoption, providing technical enablement, documentation, and operational guidance.
Candidate Profile & Qualifications
What You'll Bring (Required)
- Experience: Proven experience as a Product Owner, Technical Product Manager, or Squad Lead delivering enterprise IT operations, infrastructure, or platform tools.
- Domain Knowledge: Practical understanding of AIOps, full-stack observability platforms Datadog, and modern IT service management (ITSM).
- Agile Acumen: Solid experience managing product backlogs, user stories, and two-week sprint cadences within a scaled Agile framework.
- Automation Mindset: Demonstrated passion for driving automation, self-healing systems, and proactive incident elimination.
- FinOps & Governance: Familiarity with cloud/platform cost tracking, utilization metrics, and vendor SLA management.
- Communication: Fluency in English with strong interpersonal skills to influence cross-functional technical teams and global business stakeholders.
Nice to Have
- Agile or Scrum certifications (CSPO, PSPO, SAFe).
- Background in cloud infrastructure Azure (GCP nice to have) and modern Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) concepts.
- Experience coordinating managed services and offshore delivery vendor partners.
What You Can Expect from Mars
- Purpose & Culture: Work alongside diverse and talented Associates, all guided by our Five Principles, building the world we want tomorrow, today.
- Continuous Growth: Best-in-class learning and development support from Day 1, including access to our in-house Mars University.
- Total Rewards: Highly competitive salary and benefits package, including an annual company performance bonus.
- Flexibility: Modern hybrid working arrangements supporting a healthy work-life balance.
Equal Opportunity at Mars
Mars is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.
If you need assistance or an accommodation during the application process due to a disability, it is available upon request.