Product Owner

About Adelphi
Adelphi's Vision is to build the biggest AI Deployment company for National Security, which requires talent that is extremely good at problem solving, gets excited about National Security challenges, and thrives in software factories. We're executing a Mission that (1) Identifies the core bottlenecks in Warfighting, Intelligence and the Enterprise, (2) Assigns top talent with backgrounds in systems and machine learning engineering, and (3) Finds repeatability in solution development to target similar offices across the DoW/IC. The business has 10x'd in under two years and has built trust with the senior most leaders at the Department of War and Intelligence Community.

About the Role

We're hiring a Product Owner to run delivery planning for a large public sector customer in an AI R&D environment. You'll be forward deployed with our engineering team and you'll own the documents the program plans against: the PRDs, the roadmaps, the backlog, and the timelines we commit to.

Most of that doesn't exist yet. We're shipping fast for a customer who tracks our output closely, and when a date moves there's often no document either side can point to. Your job is to fix that and then keep it fixed, so the engineers can move without renegotiating scope every week.

You're the first person in this seat. You'll work closely with our lead forward deployed engineer and report to our Sr. Director of Product Operations, with a lot of room to decide how the work gets planned and run. The program spans a wide range of missions, and you'll get to run delivery at startup speed inside government work.

Location: This role is based in the DC/Metro area - we follow a hybrid work model with three days per week in office or onsite with customers.

Clearance Requirement: An active U.S. Government clearance is required.

Is this you?

We're an AI-native company. That expectation covers this role too, even though you won't be writing code.

• 2–5 years as a product owner, scrum master, or technical program manager, with at least three years delivering in the public sector.

• You've worked without a spec before. When something is undefined, you go define it.

• You can size work credibly. You need to follow what an engineer tells you and say something when an estimate doesn't add up.

• You've run delivery in Jira, Linear or a similar tool, and you know how to keep a board honest.

• You're very organized and detail-oriented, and it shows up in the documents you leave behind.

• Scope changes here. Direction changes. Contractors from other organizations on the program will make your week harder. None of that rattles you.

• You care about the work getting done more than whose name is on it.

• You're steady in front of a customer and confident about what your team brings to the table.

Expectations

• Own delivery planning across every project we support for this customer. Scope, sequence, timeline, and getting the work finished.

• Write and maintain the PRDs and roadmaps. These are the documents we and the customer both point to when a date moves.

• Run the agile function. Structure the backlog, build the tickets with the engineers doing the work, hold the delivery cadence.

• Own requirements intake from the weekly mission owner touchpoints. Write the summaries, capture what was actually asked for, and turn it into work the team can pick up.

• Define what done looks like on each project, and hold the line on scope with documentation behind you.

• Build the delivery reporting and metrics our customer's program leadership uses to see where we stand.

• Establish how we intake, build and deliver new projects in this customer space, at a standard that brings them back for more work.

Bonus Points

• You like scrum and delivery management enough that you want to build the dashboards and roadmap visualizations yourself.

• You've built the wiki and the SOPs that a program actually uses.

• You've worked on AI, LLM, or data integration programs.

• You've been forward deployed or embedded with a customer.

• You've been the first product person on a program or a team.