DECON
Technical Product Owner
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Technical Product Owner (Hands-On) — 12-month FTC — £70,000–£80,000
Waterloo, London · Hybrid, typically 3 days on site, flexible
We've built the platform. We need someone to own it. We're a built-environment consultancy that has built a genuinely substantial SaaS platform — live, deployed, and used inside our business every day. Cost management and 2D take-off, project and programme management, document collaboration, planning and building control data, CRM, 3D and mapping, and an AI layer that includes our own self-hosted floor-plan recognition service.
What it doesn't have is one person who owns it end to end.
That's this role. You'll set the roadmap, cut the scope, write a serious share of the code, run the internal soft launch, and get the product to the point where we can sell it externally. You'll be accountable when it ships — and when it doesn't.
This is a builder's job, not a ceremony job. Think 60% shaping and deciding, 40% in the codebase. If you want to write tickets and hand them to a delivery team, this isn't it.
What you'll own
- The roadmap — the platform spans 20+ functional areas behind feature flags. Your first job is deciding what the product actually is, and what gets parked, merged or cut. You own that call and defend it with evidence.
- Internal soft launch — get our own consultants using it daily as their primary system of record. Real data migration, real onboarding, real training, honest adoption metrics.
- Route to market — tenancy and permissions that stand up to external customers, onboarding, security review, data protection, pricing input, demo environment. You'll drive it, with leadership, commercial and legal alongside you.
- Shipping code — every week, in production, from month one.
- Reliability, performance and cloud cost — including the QA pipeline and critical-path tests. If a demo breaks in front of a client, it's yours before it's anyone else's.
- Accountability — you know the true status at all times and say it honestly upwards, including bad news. There's nowhere for this to be delegated to.
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The stack you'd inherit
~500 TypeScript modules, ~230,000 lines, in production on Google Cloud, serving three branded hostnames from one app.
- Next.js 14 (App Router), React 18, TypeScript, Tailwind, Radix UI
- tRPC v11 with Zod; PostgreSQL via Prisma (65+ models)
- NextAuth v5 with RBAC, host-aware multi-brand auth, Microsoft and Google SSO
- Redis and BullMQ workers; custom Node server with WebSocket tunnelling
- Cloud Run and Cloud Build (staging, prod gate, QA), Cloud Storage, Sentry
- Playwright e2e suites and a feature-flag system with percentage rollout and route gating
- Mapbox, Three.js / React Three Fiber, OnlyOffice co-editing, DWG/DXF/PDF drawing import
- Microsoft 365, SharePoint, Xero, WhatsApp Business integrations
- Anthropic Claude for document generation, QS take-off and review workflows — plus a self-hosted FastAPI service running a custom-trained U-Net, Mask R-CNN and PaddleOCR pipeline for floor-plan recognition
You don't need every item on that list. You do need to be the kind of engineer who lands in an unfamiliar system this size and is useful within a month.
What we're looking for
- You've shipped and owned a product end to end — idea to real users depending on it. We'll want to hear what you chose not to build.
- Strong current hands-on TypeScript and React, including production Next.js.
- Typed API layer plus relational database in production — tRPC/Prisma/Postgres ideal, equivalents fine.
- You've owned production: deploys, monitoring, incidents, the consequences of a bad release.
- Real product judgement — you can define the smallest thing that solves the problem and say no credibly.
- Clear communication with non-technical senior stakeholders.
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Nice to have: internal-tool-to-commercial-SaaS experience; a built-environment background (construction, architecture, engineering, QS, property) or proven ability to get fluent in a complex domain fast; GCP; shipped ML/LLM features; CAD, BIM or geospatial data.
We're not asking for Scrum certification or a specific number of years.
Details
12-month fixed-term contract, full-time, employed — with a genuine opportunity to extend beyond the twelve months for the right person. £70,000–£80,000 depending on experience. 25 days' holiday plus a day off for your birthday. Waterloo, London — typically three days a week in the office, flexible. Right to work in the UK required; we are not able to sponsor visas.
To apply
Send a CV plus half a page to koko@deconpm.com covering:
- A product you owned end to end and what you cut from it
- Something you shipped you'd build differently now
- Anything in the technical description above you have a strong opinion about
Please don't send a generic cover letter.
Process
- 30-minute intro call
- 90-minute technical and product conversation walking through the real codebase (not a whiteboard algorithm test)
- A short exercise scoped to a few hours, or a structured review of your own prior work if you prefer
- Final conversation on ways of working and terms
Decon is an equal opportunities employer. We'll make reasonable adjustments at any stage — just tell us what you need.
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