Technical Product Owner

Join DHCSs Behavioral Health Transformation: Where Purpose Meets Innovation

Why DHCS
At DHCS we are leading a transformative journey in Behavioral Health reshaping systems and services to ensure better outcomes for communities across California. Our Behavioral Health transformation initiative is more than a projectits a movement to make California a leader in accessible high-quality health services. Were setting the stage for a new era of government services built on agile methodologies cutting-edge technology continuous improvement and a relentless commitment to serving the public good.

At DHCS were looking for innovators who are passionate about purposeful work and excited by the opportunity to drive lasting change through innovative solutions.

Our Core Values (Achieve Together Be Curious Elevate Yourself and Deliver Value)

• We achieve together by championing a team-oriented workplace built on mutual respect collaboration and open communication.

• We encourage individuals and teams to constantly be curious and seek a deeper understanding and fresh ideas that drive innovation and meaningful change.

• We provide a supportive workplace where you can elevate yourself and achieve personal growth through continuous learning focused effort and perseverance.

• We deliver value as part of every action we take to serve Californias citizens
  
  We work within government for governmentbut we dont work like government
  Were agile in practice and philosophy
  Were purpose-driven and outcome-obsessed
  Were modernizing behavioral health technology in Californiaincluding addressing overdose suicide and the crises that leave people on the streets
  
  Were honest about the challengesstate government is bureaucratic and we cant match most tech salaries. But heres what we can offer:
  Purpose that matters
  Teammates who care deeply
  Work-life balance (no nights weekends offshoreor burnout)
  Fully remote work
  Were not just changing legacy tech into modern scalable techwere changing how the government sector uses technology
  
  Description
  The Senior Technical Product Owner drives delivery of DHCSs modern data platform and behavioral health (BH) data products. This role owns the backlog for data engineering teams and ensures alignment between business policy and technical objectives. The PO partners with Product Managers data engineers analysts and policy experts to enable accurate timely and actionable data pipelines and reporting capabilities.
  This role is responsible for converting objectives key results product strategy and roadmaps into well-groomed prioritized backlogs that deliver measurable value improve data quality and ensure compliance with state and federal behavioral health reporting requirements.
  Responsibilities

• Backlog Ownership & Prioritization
  • Own refine and maintain the product backlog for data engineering teams delivering the DHCS data platform and BH data products.
  • Translate policy program and stakeholder requirements into actionable epics features and user stories with clear acceptance criteria.
• Strategic Alignment & Delivery
  • Collaborate with Product Managers to define and maintain product objectives and key results (OKRs).
  • Align backlog priorities with strategic goals compliance mandates and agency-wide data initiatives.
  • Collaborates with Product & Delivery Managers on budget oversight and financial accountabilityincluding tool procurement monitoring burn rate relative to sprint velocity and ensuring alignment between delivery cadence and contractual or funding constraints.
• Data Product Development
  • Support delivery of core data products including reporting pipelines compliance dashboards analytics tools and data integration services.
  • Ensure data solutions enable oversight performance monitoring and cross-county learning.
• Stakeholder & Policy Integration
  • Work with policy teams analysts and external partners (e.g. counties MCPs QHIOs) to gather requirements and validate outputs.
  • Ensure solutions align with behavioral health policy reporting standards and privacy regulations (HIPAA 42 CFR Part 2).
• Metrics & Continuous Improvement
  • Define track and report on success metrics (e.g. data quality pipeline performance reporting accuracy adoption).
  • Drive backlog items that improve data completeness timeliness and usability.
  • Facilitate discovery prototyping and testing to validate solutions.
• Collaboration & Leadership
  • Lead agile ceremonies with cross-functional teams (engineering analytics UX policy).
  • Champion the voice of data users and ensure solutions meet the needs of DHCS analysts leadership and counties.
  • Provide thought leadership on best practices in data product development and platform management.

• Experience
  • 7 years in product ownership with significant experience in data analytics and reporting.
  • Proven track record managing complex data engineering or analytics backlogs in an Agile environment.
  • Experience with reporting requirements development data modeling data platforms data pipelines and analytics tools (e.g. Databricks Snowflake PowerBI Tableau).
  • Demonstrated ability to translate policy and compliance requirements into technical product deliverables.
  • Demonstrated experience supporting products or teams operating in cloud-based environments such as AWS and Azure with a strong understanding of infrastructure deployment workflows and cloud-native service integration.
  • Background in healthcare government or compliance-driven industries strongly preferred.
• Skills
  • Backlog and roadmap management for data products and/or platforms
  • Strong understanding of data engineering concepts (ETL/ELT entity resolution semantic layers data governance)
  • Data-driven decision-making and outcome-based prioritization
  • Ability to define track and communicate product OKRs and metrics
  • Exceptional communication and storytelling to bridge technical and non-technical stakeholders
  • Owns the full operational lifecycle of their product areaincluding backlog management incident response and risk mitigationensuring stability resilience and alignment with business goals.
  • Strategic and systems-level thinking with ability to balance short-term delivery and long-term planning
  • Effective leadership in cross-functional highly regulated environments

• Experience working with policy and program staff to align data products with legislative and regulatory mandates.
• Knowledge of data privacy and security requirements in healthcare.

Speridian is an Equal Opportunity Employer