Technical Product Owner

Join DHCS’s Behavioral Health Transformation: Where Purpose Meets Innovation

Speridian Technologies is recruiting for a Senior Technical Product Owner for our State of California Client, the Department of Healthcare Services, Behavioral Health. This person will be part of a long-term, fully budgeted, state-of-the-art, extremely vast technical modernization project working with a variety of cross-functional teams and stakeholders.

This is a remote role; however, there will may meetings in the Sacramento area during the year.  Candidates are expected to work business hours, Monday-Friday, Pacific Time Zone.

Join DHCS’s Behavioral Health Transformation: Where Purpose Meets Innovation
Location: Remote in the United States
Department: Department of Healthcare Services (DHCS)
Commitment: Full-Time Consultant (W2 employee of Speridian or 1099/IC for Speridian) 

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 project—it’s a movement to make California a leader in accessible, high-quality health services. We’re 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, we’re 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 California’s citizens
  
  We work within government, for government—but we don’t work like government
  We’re agile in practice and philosophy
  We’re purpose-driven and outcome-obsessed
  We’re modernizing behavioral health technology in California—including addressing overdose, suicide, and the crises that leave people on the streets
  
  We’re honest about the challenges—state government is bureaucratic, and we can't match most tech salaries. But here’s what we can offer:
  Purpose that matters
  Teammates who care deeply
  Work-life balance (no nights, weekends, offshore or burnout)
  Fully remote work
  We're not just changing legacy tech into modern, scalable tech—we're changing how the government sector uses technology
  
  Description
  The Senior Technical Product Owner drives delivery of DHCS’s 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 accountability—including 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.

Qualifications

• 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 area—including backlog management, incident response, and risk mitigation—ensuring 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

Additional Preferred Skills

• 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