Product Owner - OpenShift Virtualization (KubeVirt)

The Role: Product Owner - OpenShift Virtualization (KubeVirt)

Location: Remote

Position Type: Contract Inside IR35

Remote work option Available: Remote

Job Description:
Role Summary (Executive Overview)

We are seeking a Product Owner to lead the strategy, roadmap, and delivery of OpenShift Virtualization capabilities built on KubeVirt, enabling enterprise-grade virtualization workloads to run natively on Kubernetes. This role owns the product vision and execution across platform engineering, infrastructure, security, networking, storage, and operations, ensuring we deliver a scalable, resilient, and compliant virtualization platform that meets demanding enterprise SLAs.

The ideal candidate combines strong product leadership with deep hands-on technical fluency in OpenShift/Kubernetes virtualization, including VM life cycle, storage and network performance, security controls, observability, automation, and operational readiness.

Key Responsibilities

Product Strategy & Roadmap Leadership

  • Define and drive the product vision for OpenShift Virtualization and associated services (VM provisioning, migration, backup/restore, DR, multi-tenancy, policy-driven governance).
  • Own the multi-quarter roadmap, aligning capabilities to business outcomes such as VMware modernization, cost optimization, faster provisioning, and platform standardization.
  • Establish product positioning for internal stakeholders and engineering teams: why this, why now, and how success is measured .

Delivery Ownership (Outcomes, Not Activity)

  • Create and manage epics, features, user stories, and acceptance criteria with measurable outcomes and operational readiness baked in.
  • Lead delivery ceremonies and governance: prioritization, backlog refinement, sprint planning, release readiness, and cross-team dependency management.
  • Drive release strategy (phased adoption, pilot - scale patterns), ensuring platform stability and operational maturity before broad rollout.

Deep Technical Product Ownership (KubeVirt/OpenShift Virtualization)

  • Provide product leadership across:
    • VM life cycle management (create/clone/snapshot, templates, cloud-init, day-2 operations).
    • Migration approaches (eg, rehost, refactor boundaries; integration with migration toolchains where applicable).
    • Networking (Multus, SR-IOV, performance tuning, network policies, ingress/egress considerations).
    • Storage (ODF/Ceph, CSI, performance tiers, snapshots/volume cloning, backup integration).
    • Security and compliance (RBAC, SCC/PSA, image signing, secrets management, policy-as-code).
    • Observability (metrics/logging/tracing; SLOs; capacity and performance baselining).
    • Automation (GitOps with Argo CD, Ansible, CI/CD enablement for platform services).

Stakeholder Leadership & Executive Communication

  • Partner with Infrastructure, App teams, Security, Risk/Compliance, Architecture, and Operations to align priorities and unblock delivery.
  • Provide crisp executive-level communications: BLUF updates, risk trade-offs, and decision papers.
  • Lead stakeholder expectations and drive governance for standards: tenancy model, quotas, performance tiers, service catalog, and support model.

Job Details

Company
Vallum
Location
Sheffield, Yorkshire, United Kingdom S5 9
Hybrid / Remote Options
Employment Type
Contract
Salary
GBP Annual
Posted