Senior / Staff Product Manager – Payments

Sits within a newly acquired startup building an AI-enabled, autonomous banking platform for Tier-1 financial institutions within the banking group. The Product Manager is the single-threaded product owner for the Payments component: vision, roadmap, requirements, prioritization, and measurable outcomes from discovery through production adoption. Requires deep UK or US payments expertise, an engineering foundation, and end-to-end ownership of what we build and why. The first assignment is a live Tier-1 bank payments program with a signed-scope deadline. This is not a program- or delivery-management role: client-program orchestration sits with the Forward Deployed team, and engineering owns architecture and implementation.

Payments Strategy & Roadmap –Own the direction: Define the multi-year Payments strategy and rolling roadmap across UK and US requirements; decide what to build, defer, simplify, reuse, or deprecate. –Own the scheme calendar: Productize non-discretionary change — Nacha rules, ISO 20022 deadlines, scheme mandates — before it becomes urgent. –Keep the roadmap on track and define success: STP, success and return rates, latency, availability, reconciliation breaks, onboarding lead time, adoption. Payments Domain & Client Leadership –Be the SME: Serve as the internal product authority on how rails, schemes, participants, processors, settlement models, and operating rules work end to end. –Problem-solve with clients: Join client working sessions to define what to build — whiteboard the actual payment lifecycle, expose missing controls and edge cases, and identify the minimum viable reusable capability. –Guard the platform: Convert recurring client and field signal into reusable payment primitives, not client-specific forks; countersign any client commitment that binds the roadmap before it is promised. –Challenge constructively: Push back on clients and internal experts with evidence; document decisions so they stay made. Technical Product Definition –Write the contract: Author PRDs and decision documents; define payment APIs, events, data and state models, error semantics, and acceptance criteria. –Sweat the semantics: Partner with engineering on idempotency, duplicate handling, retries, ordering, cut-offs and value dates, settlement finality, and recovery. –Own the boundaries: Define product contracts with Ledger, Customer, Reg & Compliance, Orchestration, Reconciliation, Data, and Command Center. –Respect the split: This role owns what, why, priority, and acceptance criteria; engineering owns architecture, implementation, and estimates.

Payments Expertise –Deep, hands-on expertise in UK rails (Faster Payments, Bacs, CHAPS, Open Banking) or US rails (ACH/Nacha, Fedwire, FedNow, RTP, CHIPS); near-term roadmap weights UK depth. –Working command of ISO 20022, settlement and finality, cut-offs and value dates, returns and reversals, exceptions, reconciliation, and scheme onboarding and certification. –Practical exposure to more than one payment type (instant, batch/ACH, wire, direct debit, cross-border). Strongly preferred: working knowledge of the other market's rails. Technical Foundation –4+ years owning a technical product or platform end to end, including at least one taken personally through launch, adoption, and iteration. –Engineering background or equivalent hands-on record: typically 3+ years building, shipping, and operating production software — not coordinating its delivery. –Fluent in APIs, event-driven and distributed systems, data and state modeling, reliability, security, and observability; reads architecture diagrams without a translator. Operating Style –Strong ownership mindset — owns outcomes, not tasks; a product owner who ships, not a requirements librarian. High agency; writes the playbook when none exists. –Technically credible and commercially grounded — earns trust with senior