Technical Product Owner (m/w/d) - Email

Become Technical Product Owner (m/w/d) - Email at Retarus.

Retarus is a worldwide provider of cloud-based messaging solutions at enterprise scale. We serve over 40% of the companies listed on the S&P Global 100, e.g. Adidas, Bayer, SAP, BNP Paribas, Goldman Sachs, T-Systems, Swarovski & UPS, as well as governmental agencies and major players in markets across the world. Privately owned and founder-managed for over thirty years, Retarus is customer-oriented, stable, a fair employer, and a strategic business partner with a long-term vision. With some 500 employees in 19 offices on four continents, Retarus operates locally and thinks globally: our teams are organized across borders and are highly integrated. This makes Retarus a multicultural, multilingual, and engaging workplace. We are committed to creating a diverse and dynamic environment for our employees, with generous compensation, time off, and a global, collaborative workplace.

About the Role:

As Technical Product Owner, you will be part of the Email competence center (TEM / Email Security) and work closely with the Technical Product Manager. Your mission is to translate the Email domain vision and roadmap into concrete, deliverable backlog items and to guide our development teams in implementing robust, scalable, secure and efficient Email services. You will help ensure that our Email products deliver high deliverability, strong protection and a reliable experience for enterprise customers with demanding communication and security requirements. You bring a strong software engineering background (ideally in backend, email infrastructure or security/communication platforms) and have grown into a Product Owner role. You are comfortable discussing architecture, performance, filtering and routing details with developers, while also understanding customer use cases, SLAs, compliance and operational constraints. You will sit at the intersection of product, security, operations and engineering: refining requirements, shaping epics and user stories, and ensuring that Email features and platform capabilities are implemented with high quality and are operable at scale.

What we offer

• Mobile working and flexible working time
• Collaborative, diverse company culture and superior team spirit
• Flat hierarchies and great feedback culture
• Development opportunities & career perspective
• International business & cross-site collaboration
• Modern, dog-friendly offices with nice amenities
• Company-paid health insurance, public transportation, lunch vouchers and further benefits

What you'll do

• Manage and prioritize the Email product backlog, ensuring it is accurate, up to date and fully aligned with the Email roadmap, product goals and dependencies.
• Translate high-level requirements into clear user stories, acceptance criteria and tasks that can be implemented predictably by engineering.
• Work closely with engineering teams to ensure a shared understanding of requirements, technical constraints and delivery expectations, and to support sound technical decision-making around email infrastructure.
• Support and coordinate the development process (e.g. refinement, sprint planning, reviews) to enable predictable, high-quality delivery of Email features and platform improvements.
• Track and report delivery metrics and progress against roadmap milestones, highlighting risks, dependencies and blockers early and driving mitigation together with the TPM and engineering leads.
• Coordinate the release process for Email features, including preparing documentation and release notes, and aligning with Customer Enablement, Support and other relevant teams to ensure smooth onboarding and support.
• Manage the feature lifecycle, including updates and upgrades of technical components and services, and making data-driven recommendations to deprecate or retire (EOL) features where appropriate.
• Keep technical documentation up to date, including business process overviews, integration and API documentation, and operational runbooks where relevant.
• Balance business features with technical work, ensuring technical debt, refactoring, observability and reliability/security improvements are visible in the backlog and appropriately prioritized

What you'll need

• 3+ years of professional experience as a Software Engineer / Developer (ideally in backend, email infrastructure, security or messaging platforms) and subsequent experience as Product Owner, Technical Product Manager or similar in complex enterprise or B2B environments.
• Strong experience with agile methods, sprint planning, backlog management and working as Product Owner in Scrum teams, including the ability to transform strategic direction and product requirements into structured epics, user stories and acceptance criteria.
• Solid understanding of email architectures and technologies (e.g. SMTP, MTAs, queues, routing, authentication standards, filtering pipelines), enabling you to have meaningful technical discussions with development and operations teams.
• Familiarity with SLAs, monitoring, high availability, incident management and security in production systems, and how these aspects should be reflected in backlog items and technical priorities.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills; you can quickly grasp complex domain topics, operational constraints and technical dependencies.
• Excellent communication skills in English (German is a plus) and a proactive, hands-on attitude: you enjoy digging into details, supporting the team and seeing features through to completion.

What you can expect

At Retarus, you will work on impactful and dynamic projects, with real opportunities to make a difference. Our customers are leaders across diverse industries, with constantly evolving needs and high expectations. You’ll be working with cutting-edge technology and great creative leeway to meet customers’ needs – and the projects you work on will be deployed globally. Working at Retarus, you will collaborate closely with convivial, culturally diverse teammates. You will grow professionally in a dynamic and exciting workplace and design impactful solutions in real time with top companies.

Very important

Come as you are. Retarus is committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, or veteran status.

Apply via our online application portal – it’s easy and doesn’t take long. Our colleague Felix Gansmeier is happy to field any questions you may have: Felix.Gansmeier@retarus.de

We’re looking forward to getting to know you!