Sr Technical Product Owner

twistbioscience; South San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Twist Bioscience is seeking a Senior Technical Product Owner to drive cross-functional system initiatives across our synthetic DNA platform. You will own requirements, documentation, and testing, partnering with engineering and project management to deliver high-impact solutions that align with business strategy.

The ideal candidate has 5+ years in technical product management, strong analytical skills, and experience with enterprise systems.

Qualifications

• Translate scientific, operational, or customer needs into functional specifications that align with technical constraints and business goals.
• Excellent communication and collaboration with business stakeholders and technical teams.
• Ability to work in a fast-paced, agile development environment with cross-functional partners.

Responsibilities

• Own the functional definition of system initiatives and translate into epics and user stories for development and QA.
• Lead requirements intake and clarification with stakeholders across functions.
• Partner with project management, engineering, architecture, and QA through design, build, testing, and delivery.
• Communicate scope, status, risks, and dependencies proactively to stakeholders.
• Support testing, launch, and stabilization and provide business context for issue resolution.

Skills

Technical product management

Customer relationship management

Education

Bachelor's degree in technical/engineering/science

Tools

Salesforce (SFDC)

Job description

Sr Technical Product Owner (Hybrid in South San Francisco, CA)

About the Role

At Twist Bioscience, we're scaling the digital systems that power our synthetic DNA platform and enable innovation across our commercial, scientific, and operational teams. We're seeking a Senior Technical Product Owner to lead cross-functional system projects, someone who can dive deep into the details while helping improve how we work.

In this role, you will own hands-on work across requirements gathering, documentation, and testing for high-impact system initiatives. We are looking for someone with a proven track record of maintaining effective business relationships to ensure IBT can deliver solutions that align with business strategies and objectives. This role sits at the intersection of product, engineering, and business.

The ideal candidate has a strong analytical mindset, solid experience with enterprise and technical systems, and a knack for translating complex business and product needs into clear, executable technical requirements.

What You will do

You will serve as the primary business-facing partner on system initiatives, owning the functional definition of what needs to be built and partnering closely with engineering and project management, who own technical design, delivery sequencing, and timelines.

Requirements and Solution definition

• Lead requirements intake and clarification with business stakeholders across functions (e.g., Product, Marketing, Sales Operations, Finance, Customer Support, and R&D).
• Define and document functional requirements, business rules, edge cases, and acceptance criteria, including impacted existing logic, constraints, and exceptions, and translate them into epics and user stories ready for development and QA.
• Identify impacted process areas, systems, and dependencies end to end (e.g., product setup, pricing, quoting, order intake, manufacturing, fulfillment, and invoicing), along with the SMEs and stakeholders within each.
• Drive alignment with cross-system partners and SMEs to ensure requirements are complete and consistent across integrated systems and address emerging business needs, positioning the organization to stay ahead of new commercial requests.
• Ensure requirements and solutions are compliant and audit-ready (e.g., SOX, ISO), partnering with Finance, Quality and other internal stakeholders.
• Demonstrate strong customer empathy and advocate for customer needs throughout the product development process.

Delivery partnership and communication

• Provide development leads, architects, and project managers with the full end-to-end context and scope of each initiative, and lead functional grooming sessions.
• Partner with project management, scrum masters, developers, architecture, and SWQA through design, build, testing, and delivery, clarifying requirements and surfacing risks, gaps, and dependencies early.
• Communicate proactively and consistently with business stakeholders on scope, status, risks, and dependencies throughout each initiative.
• Influence scope tradeoffs and solution options by bringing business and cross-system context to technical discussions.

Testing, launch, and stabilization

• Plan and lead end-to-end user acceptance testing across multiple systems: kick off with testers, provide context and demos, support issue logging and defect clarification, and obtain stakeholder sign-off before go-live.
• Support release, hypercare, and post-launch stabilization, providing business context to help assess the criticality of issues.
• Stay informed on production issues and contribute business and system context to their resolution.

Continuous improvement

• Share feedback and ideas to continuously improve how the team runs projects, gathers requirements, and tests, including intake playbooks, documentation standards, and testing practices.
• Look for opportunities to leverage AI tools to work more efficiently, such as in requirements documentation, analysis, and testing.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in a technical, engineering, or scientific field; minimum of 5+ years of experience in a related field
• 5+ years of experience in technical product management, customer relationship management, or products, systems, or applications experience.
• Ability to translate scientific, operational, or customer needs into functional specifications that align with technical constraints and business goals.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, comfortable partnering with both business stakeholders and technical teams.
• Growth mindset, with a drive to continuously improve systems and processes.
• Customer-centric mindset and strong sense of customer empathy
• Ability to work in a fast-paced, agile development environment

Preferred Qualifications

• Advanced degree (Master's or PhD)
• Experience in biotech, life sciences, or synthetic biology environments.
• Hands-on experience with Salesforce (SFDC), such as Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, or relate