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NetBird is a German software company building a zero-trust network security platform designed to be accessible and affordable for teams of all sizes. Since launching on GitHub in 2021, NetBird has grown to serve hundreds of thousands of users and machines worldwide, replacing traditional centralized VPNs with a modern, open-source alternative.
As Technical Product Owner, you will be the bridge between users and the engineering team on NetBird's core platform—the clients, dashboard, API, and self-hosted setup. Currently, the CTO manages product alongside engineering leadership; you will assume significant day-to-day product responsibilities and report directly to the CTO.
Key responsibilities:
- Own and maintain the backlog in Linear: triage incoming issues, write clear tickets with context and acceptance criteria, and keep priorities current.
- Build a systematic feedback collection process from customers, GitHub issues, community channels, support, and sales calls; translate feedback into well-framed problems for the engineering team.
- Conduct direct user and customer conversations to understand their setups and the problems behind feature requests.
- Plan regular development cycles with engineering, decompose larger features into shippable increments, and shepherd them through to release.
- Keep the broader company informed on shipping work through release notes, changelogs, and updates for sales and support teams.
- Close the feedback loop with contributors, ensuring they understand what happened with their input.
- Identify patterns across feedback and bring data-backed insights into roadmap discussions.
This is a hands-on technical product owner role in a small, growing team. You will not write production code, but you will engage deeply with engineers on technical implementation, reproduce issues yourself, and accurately assess effort. You will help shape how product work operates at NetBird as the company scales.
REQUIREMENTS:
Must-haves:
- 3+ years of experience as a Product Owner, Product Manager, or similar role at a technical B2B SaaS, infrastructure, or developer tools company.
- Technical background: comfortable reading API documentation, following GitHub discussions, and collaborating with engineers to understand how systems work.
- Understanding of networking fundamentals: IP, DNS, routing, firewalls, and VPNs.
- Hands-on experience managing backlogs in Linear, Jira, or similar tools; ability to write tickets that engineers can execute without follow-up meetings.
- Direct experience working with customers or users and translating their feedback into prioritized work.
- Strong judgment on prioritization; ability to say no, explain reasoning, and maintain team alignment.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills in English; preference for written documentation.
- AI-native working style: daily use of AI tools and coding agents for tasks like feedback sorting, problem investigation, and ticket drafting; understanding of where AI adds value and where it does not.
- Comfort in small, fast-moving teams where processes are still being developed.
Nice-to-haves:
- Experience with networking, security, or zero-trust products.
- Open source project or developer community experience.
- CLI product development experience.
- Hands-on experience with self-hosting, Docker, Kubernetes, or cloud infrastructure.
- Some coding experience sufficient to read pull requests or reproduce bugs.
- Experience using product analytics to support decision-making.
