About Aflac

While Aflac are a Fortune 500 U.S. company and one of the largest brands in the US and Japan, there is a very good chance you’ve not heard of us (yet). Here’s the deal: We help people cover medical expenses beyond their standard health insurance, and when they come to us they really need us. So, in Belfast, we are building great technology to support our customers in their greatest time of need.

We are looking to create a centre of excellence in Northern Ireland that will be globally recognised for its adaptability and reinvention. If you want to learn new development languages, create new products, and infuse innovation into our cyber security platform – we should talk.

The team 

One of the first high-performing teams we've recruited will be responsible for designing and developing workflow automation solutions using Pega (check out Pega.com if you haven’t heard of the technology before – it’s pretty impressive).  Although this technology has been around for a while, it has recently been supercharged and now offers impressive capabilities augmenting workflow automation with Robotics and Artificial Intelligence.  At Aflac Northern Ireland we are utilising Pega to develop smart technology solutions that will directly improve our customer experience.

The intention is for our teams to continually adapt and reinvent their skills and capabilities over time as technologies change and evolve. We will provide the right challenges and opportunities to enable your success, however we need you to bring your enthusiasm, the ability to learn quickly, and to take minimum-viable-product technology to produce industrialised solutions for the enterprise.  Once you have successfully delivered robust and scalable solutions for Aflac, there will be a new technology waiting to be explored and built to scale within our organisation.  We’ll be keeping things pretty fresh.

The Role

We want experienced Product Owners who can emotionally engage with the vision of the product, understand the impact to the policyholder, and strongly influence decisions regarding prioritisation.  Experience with Pega is not required, but you do need to have proven experience of successfully working in Agile teams and getting the best from a capable group of developers, testers, and DevOps people. 

What you'll be doing 

• Being a key member of the Agile/Scrum team, displaying excellent leadership qualities
• Understanding and defending the vision of the product and partnering with the US-based Product Owner to translate the vision between business and technical teams
• Influencing and being vocal about product prioritisation and development of the product roadmap
• Taking customer needs and turning them into a fully-scoped product backlog
• Breaking down backlog items into clearly-articulated epics and user stories Ensuring a good relationship between the team and the Scrum Master, partnering for grooming and planning sessions.
• Collaborating daily with agile team members and ensuring that they have a clear understanding of the requirements and priorities at all times.
• Interface with other agile teams and the rest of the organization to manage dependencies and coach other agile teams, program level and portfolio level teams as needed

What you should have (don't worry if you don't have it all)

Below is an overview of the skills and experience we are looking for, but remember, don’t rule yourself out if you don’t have everything on the list – it’s your intellect and your attitude we are really after.

Essential

• 3+ years as Product Owner in an Agile/Scrum team.  For more senior roles 6+ years commercial experience is required.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Ability to clearly communicate a vision and translate effectively between business and technical teams
• Understands the big picture but can drill down into the detail when required
• Bachelors degree, preferably in a Computer Science, Engineering, or STEM subject preferred.  Comparable commercial experience may also be considered.

Desirable Criteria

• Experience with business process management technologies
• Experience in projects that support marketing or customer service
• Experience with different types of Agile project delivery
• Knowledge and experience of DevOps as part of Agile software development
• Experience of delivering Agile solutions for customers/clients located in a different time-zone

So that’s us.  Thanks for taking the time to read this far (pretty impressive in the era of 280-character tweets).  We look forward to hearing from you if you fancy joining a new tech innovation company with the agility of a start-up and the stability of a Fortune 500 U.S. company.

Aflac Northern Ireland is an equal opportunities employer