Product Owner - Maritime

Product Owner — Maritime (ASO & Smart Sensors) Department: Product | Location: Hood River, OR (in-office, full-time) | Travel: Up to 30% About Overwatch: Overwatch Imaging automates the collection, analysis, and delivery of time-critical geospatial intelligence for missions that matter. Overwatch AI software automatically manages airborne sensors through smart pointing commands, automated detection of objects of interest, and computer-generated reporting of collected intelligence outputs for communications-efficient reporting. Overwatch smart sensors are multi-camera, multi-spectral stabilized airborne payloads designed for automated operation by edge computers rather than human sensor operators. Together, our capabilities enable life-saving agencies to scan wide areas and find small objects of interest, faster and more efficiently than with human-in-the-loop systems, so our customers can focus less on the search and more on the best response. About this Role: The Maritime Product Owner shapes the maritime vertical of our ASO software and Smart Sensors product line by bringing deep, first-hand industry expertise to bear on what we build and why. This role is the in-house authority on maritime ISR missions — surface search, vessel tracking and classification, dark-vessel detection, SAR, counter-narcotics, fisheries enforcement, and maritime domain awareness — and the trusted voice of the operator across Product, Engineering, Design, and Business Development. You will partner closely with our central Product Manager who owns delivery cadence, sprint mechanics, and cross-product backlog discipline; you feed that machine with validated mission problems, prioritized epics, and crisp requirements grounded in real operations. This is an ideal role for someone with a maritime ISR or sensor operations background who wants to translate hard-earned operational expertise into a product that genuinely changes how maritime missions are flown. You will be expected to embrace AI aggressively — both because edge AI is the heart of our product, and because we expect our team to use modern AI tooling to move faster in everything we do. This role is expected to be full-time (in office) in Hood River. We are NOT accepting candidates for Remote Work at this time. What You’ll Do: - *Be the In-House Maritime Subject Matter Expert* - Serve as the resident authority on maritime intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions, customer types, platforms, sensors, and operational realities; translate doctrine, jargon, and mission profiles into product context the team can build against. - Educate Engineering, Design, Business Development, and Marketing on what maritime operators actually do and why it matters. - *Own Maritime Customer & Mission Discovery* - Build and maintain direct relationships with maritime operators across the Department of Defense, U.S. Coast Guard, allied navies, and commercial maritime customers. - Run structured discovery — ride-alongs, mission debriefs, sensor log reviews, post-mission interviews — to surface real operational pain rather than feature wishlists, and maintain personas and mission-use-case libraries as the trusted voice of the customer internally. - *Shape Maritime Strategy & Roadmap* - Partner with the VP of Product to define and evolve the maritime vertical strategy and roadmap. - Maintain a prioritized maritime epic backlog using our internal scoring framework, biased toward features that remove sensor operator tasks rather than augment them. - Track the maritime market, programs of record, and competitive moves; bring forward signal that should change priorities. - *Author High-Quality Requirements* - Write clear product briefs, mission-use-case documents, and epic-level requirements in Confluence and Jira that capture operational realities and mission workflows. - Hand off well-formed problems to the central Product Manager for sprint-ready decomposition; stay engaged through delivery to clarify, accep…