Product Owner - MongoDB Data Platform Engagement (3-month Contract)

gravity9 is a boutique IT consulting company headquartered in the UK with offices in the US, Canada, Poland, and Colombia. Our team has deep experience in engineering, experience design and product management. We enjoy a challenge and pride ourselves on working with our clients on their most complex problems, finding elegant and flexible solutions that help them transform their businesses.

The Role, Honestly

We're building a metadata-driven data platform on MongoDB Atlas for an enterprise client migrating off legacy relational systems. Today, standing up a single data product on the client's side takes close to a year, because integration logic is hardcoded per product with no reuse. We're building the platform that changes that: a canonical transformer, a metadata registry of reusable "recipes," a pipeline engine that generates deployable code from those recipes, and an API service — all in Java and Spring Boot, fully additive to the client's existing systems.

This is a compressed, high-visibility build. You'll work alongside a Solutions Architect, a Project Manager, and a delivery team of at least three developers and a QA engineer. You'll be the person who keeps the backlog, the requirements, and the stakeholders pointed at the same outcome — close enough to the technical detail (JSON, data models, versioning logic, API contracts) to write specs the engineering team can build against directly.

What You’ll Actually Do

•     Own and prioritize the delivery backlog across the platform's core components — the canonical transformer, the metadata registry, the pipeline engine, conditional external-source connectors, and the API service — and keep it sequenced against a fixed multi-week delivery timeline.

•     Turn business need into buildable spec: translate client requirements into clear recipes for the metadata registry, user stories, and acceptance criteria the delivery team can build against — not just a written spec, but something you stay accountable for through to shipped software.

•     Run schema and requirements sessions with the client's domain owners to nail down version-selection rules, deduplication criteria, and join logic for the canonical transformer — this is where most of the engagement's real decisions get made, early in the timeline.

•     Drive open design decisions that are still unresolved at kickoff — for example how access is filtered by requester role, and how a batch-delivered external data source gets ingested — facilitating alignment between stakeholders who haven't yet agreed, and making the call when they can't.

•     Track scope discipline: the engagement is bounded to a defined set of API queries, no new technology introductions, and additive changes only on the read side. Know the in-scope/out-of-scope lines cold and catch scope creep before it becomes a timeline problem.

•     Own the risk and dependency log, especially the load-bearing ones — upstream data-migration timelines, environment access, and client-owned DevOps support for deployment — and escalate early rather than let them surface as late surprises.

•     Coordinate a multi-stage delivery approach (discovery and design, build and integrate, validate and transfer) so work legitimately overlaps without stepping on itself — build starts on well-scoped pieces before design fully closes, and that only works if the backlog reflects it.

•     Work day-to-day with the development and QA team: groom the backlog, run or support Agile ceremonies, unblock developers, and coordinate testing so the platform gets validated against real data before handoff.

•     Partner closely with the Solutions Architect and Project Manager as the product owner of a small, high-trust core team — translating architectural decisions into a sequenced, buildable plan.

•     Represent the platform's downstream consumers who aren't in the room, and make sure the API service and materialized views actually serve what they need.

•     Plan and drive knowledge transfer so that by the end of the contract, the client's own team can extend the platform and author new recipes without you.

•     Communicate constantly and clearly across a distributed delivery team and client stakeholders, being deliberate about handoffs and written status given time-zone overlap.