Job Description
Circle K Business Centre is a shared service center which supports Circle K Europe operations through a wide range of services within Finance & Control, Information Technologies, Human Resources, Transport Fuel and Customer Service.
Circle K is part of the Canadian company Alimentation Couche Tard Inc. (Couche-Tard), one of the world's largest joint-stock convenience retail companies, listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSE). It has operations in North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. It has approximately 12,300 sites across its network in North America (U.S. and Canada), Europe (Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Ireland, Poland, the Baltics), Asia and the Middle East. We are a family of more than 100,000 merchants making it easy for our customers around the world.
In the last few years, our continuously growing development teams (currently over 200 skilled IT professionals) have successfully implemented and deployed various software solutions to Circle K customers across Europe and North America. Among the solutions you will find web applications, native mobile applications and technical components.
What you will be working on
We are looking for a Technical Product Owner to join the Retail and Digital Channels Development Section at Circle K Global Development. You will own the product backlog for a cross-functional team building retail, mobile payment and e-payment solutions - from the POS System running in our stores, through the cloud-based integration platform, to the payment and loyalty services behind them.
This is a hands-on, technical product role. You are expected to understand how the solution actually works, not only what it should do, and to be a credible partner for developers, Solution Architects and QA Engineers as well as for business stakeholders.
Product ownership and backlog:
- Own, refine and prioritise the team backlog - epics, features, user stories, spikes and technical debt - and keep it transparent and ready for the next sprints
- Translate business needs from European markets and central business functions into clear requirements with testable acceptance criteria
- Own the "what" and the "why" of the solution; partner with Solution Architects and senior developers on the "how" rather than dictating it
- Maintain and communicate a product roadmap, balancing new functionality, market rollouts, compliance work and platform health
- Define non-functional requirements (performance at the checkout, availability, security, observability) together with architecture and QA
- Take responsibility for sprint goals, accept completed work and make the call on scope trade-offs when reality differs from the plan
Payments and retail domain:
- Drive requirements for card-present and card-not-present payment flows: authorisation, settlement, refunds, reversals, partial approvals and error handling
- Own backlog items covering mobile payments and e-payments - in-app and wallet payments, tokenisation, pay-at-pump and unattended flows, e-commerce and click & collect scenarios
- Work with Product Managers, Solution Architects, payment services vendors and loyalty providers on integration scope, certification schedules and test plans
- Specify checkout, promotion, loyalty and barcode handling behaviour of the POS and downstream systems in a way that is unambiguous for developers and testable by QA
- Make sure security, compliance and regulatory requirements are represented in the backlog early rather than discovered late
- Support market pilots and rollouts: readiness criteria, cutover scope, hypercare and defect triage
Working with the team and stakeholders:
- Work day to day with developers, QA Engineers, DevOps, Solution Architects, the Delivery Manager and the Scrum Master in an agile, multinational environment
- Participate actively in refinement, planning, reviews and retrospectives; be available to the team for questions during the sprint
- Represent the team towards project representatives, business owners and other development teams, manage expectations and defend priorities with arguments and data
- Coordinate cross-team dependencies with the integration platform, POS core, loyalty and mobile application teams, and with external co-development partners
- Define and track product metrics - adoption, transaction success rates, checkout times, incident and defect trends - and use them to steer the backlog
- Contribute to release notes, functional documentation and knowledge sharing across the section
Requirements
Must have:
- 4+ years' experience as a Product Owner, Technical Product Owner, Business Analyst, Product Manager or relevant poistion in a software product or platform environment
- Strong technical foundation - you can read an OpenAPI/Swagger specification, follow a REST or SOAP contract, understand message-driven integrations, data models and system logs, and hold a design discussion with developers and architects
- Proven track record of writing epics, user stories and acceptance criteria that development teams can build from and QA can test against
- Understanding of POS systems, retail checkout flows and the constraints of in-store operations
- Experience working in SCRUM teams and with backlog tooling (Jira, Confluence or equivalent)
- Ability to prioritise under pressure, to say no with a reason, and to keep a coherent product direction across competing market requests
- Analytical mindset and comfort with data and the habit of validating assumptions with numbers
- Excellent stakeholder communication skills; able to speak to both a developer and a country business manager without losing either
- Fluent English and Polish
Nice to have:
- Previous hands-on experience as a developer, QA engineer, integration or support specialist
- Prior experience with OmniPOS / CLOUD4RETAIL or other enterprise POS platforms
- Practical experience in the payments domain: authorisation and settlement flows, PSP or acquirer integrations, and the operational reality of failed and reversed transactions
- Experience with mobile wallets, in-app payments, fuel card and unattended payment solutions
- Experience with loyalty systems, promotions engines or self-checkout solutions
- Working knowledge of PCI DSS, PSD2/SCA, EMV certification processes or tokenisation
- Knowledge of fiscalisation requirements in European markets (Poland, Baltic states, Nordics)
- Familiarity with cloud environments (Azure preferred) and edge computing architectures (central ↔ edge ↔ checkout)
- Experience in international rollouts and vendor or co-development partner management
- Product Owner or agile certification (PSPO, CSPO, SAFe POPM) or equivalent practical experience
- Degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field
Environment you will work in
Working as a Technical Product Owner at Circle K, you will own products built within the following technology environment:
- Backend (platform): Spring Boot, Spring Data, Spring Cloud, JPA/Hibernate, PostgreSQL, NoSQL (MongoDB, Cosmos DB), Redis, Azure cloud services
- Backend (POS): Spring Framework (legacy version with custom extensions and a proprietary DSL)
- Frontend: enterprise JavaScript framework applications (Employee Hub, Launchpad); React/Angular/Vue.js for custom POS apps running in an embedded browser
- POS configuration: Storemanager, Menu Editor, Data Containers, Barcode Processor rules
- Integration: Service API, REST and SOAP interfaces, external loyalty, payment and e-payment connectors
- Payments: attended and unattended terminals, PSP and acquirer integrations, mobile and in-app payment channels
- Delivery tooling: Jira, Confluence, Git, Jenkins, Sonar; DEV → TEST → PROD environment promotion and release lifecycle management
What do we offer?
- Cafeteria Platform/Multisport
- English lessons subsidized by the company
- Attractive discounts for products and services at our stations
- Employee stock purchase plan
- Employee Assistance Program (Lyra)
- Two additional days off (Good Friday, Friday after Corpus Christi) – with the possibility of exchanging for other holidays
- Employee Referral Bonus Program
- Trainings & possibility to develop skills in a wide international environment
When working with us you can depend upon it that you will not be judged on the grounds of race, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, disability, age, or other legally protected status. Oppositely – we believe that our diverse and inclusive culture helps us create an amazing atmosphere where everybody feels welcome.
Check who we are here: https://youtu.be/td-QGnNnvW0
Want to know even more about us? Take a look at our career page: https://workwithus.circlek.com/global/en/businesscentrewarsaw
Interested?
We encourage you to apply.
We know great companies are built from within, by great people like you. Come grow with us!
We´re looking forward to your application.
