At the European Patent Office (EPO) we are undertaking a major transformation aimed at building a DevOps practice, making agile principles a reality in our daily work, adopting green technologies and utilising artificial intelligence. Our mission is to support innovation, competitiveness and economic growth across Europe. We pride ourselves on taking innovation seriously and are fully committed to achieving our digital transformation. The European Patent Office's Strategic Plan 2028 emphasises its commitment to sustainability, focusing on transforming and simplifying the patent grant process (PGP).

The EPO's solution development areas have undergone a major evolution over the past five years, transforming into event-driven microservice architectures deployed through containers in the service mesh on the new Kubernetes platform. On the design side, we have adopted techniques to put the user at the centre of operations through design thinking, and brought business and development teams closer together through domain-driven design. Our aim is to shorten our delivery cycles by means of continuous testing through behaviour-driven design in continuous integration and delivery pipelines.

The digital transformation of the patent grant process will deliver fully digital end-to-end processes, and will be further supported by the introduction of artificial intelligence into our solutions. Our main challenge remains to transform existing processes implemented in legacy systems into new ways of working running on these new architectures while at the same time enabling the business team to maintain their production targets. As we build this software, we will also be working more closely than ever before with IP authorities across the world to co-create, roll out and support new software solutions.

With the first activities in our PGP programme already launched and with an eye to coping with the anticipated workload, we are developing a talent pool in anticipation of future job openings in various IT fields. We are looking for talented IT professionals with a view to preparing the next generation of tools and practices, all aimed at increasing the productivity of our workforce.

Technical application owners (TAOs) are product managers responsible for the full lifecycle of a service or application in terms of features, quality, economic aspects and support. They play a key role in driving the organisation through its digital transformation, ensuring successful introduction and operation of new business information technology solutions across the business units. To this end, they work hand in hand with stakeholders to thoroughly understand their needs, and are deeply involved in design and implementation, guiding the development teams to deliver fit-for-purpose solutions. Commitment to sharing knowledge and experience within the team, learning new technologies and contributing to our continuous transformation and development are key.

In anticipation of exciting future opportunities in different fields of IT in our organisation, we are launching a talent pool for Technical application owners (TAOs)

With us you will

• identify requirements, conceptualise solutions and develop frameworks for implementation of systems
• interpret business issues and recommend solutions
• define application architectures and check the application mapping used as part of the reference architecture framework
• evaluate vendor software and provide architectural consulting expertise and assistance
• identify and select project-specific technical components
• define interfaces and potential changes to components
• lead functional teams or projects as required
• represent the EPO in internal or external forums
• provide support and advice concerning the use of the applications system under your responsibility
• check and ensure the operational quality and performance of the application(s) under your responsibility
• co-ordinate maintenance
• manage supply chain communications
• apply standards, methods and tools
• ensure uniform and effective application of EPO regulations
• identify and update the document repository for the applications system(s) under your responsibility
• ensure the upkeep of knowledge concerning solutions used for maintenance

Apply if you have

• state-of-the-art knowledge in the respective domain
• extensive and diverse consulting experience built through customer-facing implementations, migrations and rollouts
• several years of professional experience in the areas of project management, application management, business change management and IT service management
• in-depth knowledge of and professional work experience in one or more of the relevant areas along with very good knowledge of business processes
• knowledge of agile methodologies and cloud technologies
• capacity to network, establish and sustain partnerships with a wide range of stakeholders and subject-matter experts
• ability to work independently and as part of a team

Our minimum requirements for this post

• Diploma of completed studies at master's level or – in exceptional cases – equivalent professional experience
• Generally, an excellent knowledge (at least C1) of one official language (English, French and German) and ability to understand the other two; alternatively, excellent knowledge (at least C1) of at least one official language (in such cases, the willingness to learn the missing language(s) and to reach level B2 within a set time frame would be required)
• Citizenship of one of the member states of the European Patent Organisation

Process

Candidates are kindly asked to upload an updated CV and outline their motivation in the designated application field (character limit 4000). If so wished, the motivation letter can also be uploaded as a Word or pdf attachment under "Application document" in SuccessFactors. In this case, please indicate in the designated field "Please refer to attached motivation letter".

The successful candidate will be selected on the basis of qualifications, competencies, professional experience and language knowledge, supplemented as appropriate by interviews, tests and/or a personality questionnaire.

A reserve list may be constituted, should more candidates than required at this time be considered suitable following the selection procedure. Such reserve lists are valid for 18 months and reserve list candidates may be contacted, should a vacancy with substantially the same profile arise during that period.

More information on how we recruit can be found on our EPO jobs and careers site.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Key information

Job group: 4

Grade: G7 to G10 (net (basic) monthly salary* for this vacancy: EUR 6 172 to 9 901 depending on experience and location) 

Duration of appointment: Five years, with the possibility of extension

Career path: Technical 

Location: Office-wide 

Application deadline: 11 March 2025

Interviews planned for: Second half of March 2025 - first half of April 2025

* after deduction of EPO-internal tax and before deduction of staff contributions to the social security and pension schemes.