Principal Product Manager

About the role

You will own the end-to-end product strategy for the merchant lending portfolio within Careers Payments. This role requires you to translate complex regulatory and fraud risk requirements into a clear product vision that balances compliance with seamless user experience. You will define the complete journey from merchant qualification through sign-up to ongoing management of working capital advances. Your work will directly influence the financial health and growth trajectory of Careers Commerce by enabling small and medium entrepreneurs to sell anywhere. You will act as the primary liaison between Risk, Credit, Engineering, and Design to ensure alignment on platform capabilities and risk guardrails. Success in this role means building a platform that is both robust in its risk management and frictionless for good customers. You will be responsible for driving the roadmap that powers the cash advance experience and ensuring it meets strict business KPIs.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Conduct deep analysis of Careers customer segments, Payments industry dynamics, competitor strategies, and customer pain points using data and direct feedback to uncover major product opportunities.
• Make build versus use decisions regarding vendor services and technology solutions to support the lending product roadmap.
• Partner closely with Risk and Credit teams to design and refine underwriting strategies, eligibility frameworks, pricing models, credit policies, and risk guardrails.
• Collaborate with engineering teams to prioritise, sequence, and deliver new capabilities while adhering to agile methodologies and a platform-first mindset.
• Define and own the end-to-end customer experience for qualification, sign-up, and management of working capital products.
• Establish metrics to measure product performance across adoption, utilisation, payback behaviour, losses, and overall business impact.
• Ensure the platform architecture supports regulatory and fraud compliance without introducing unnecessary friction for legitimate customers.
• Lead cross-functional initiatives that require coordination with marketing, legal, finance, and operations to launch new lending features.
• Translate complex technical and regulatory constraints into clear product requirements for the engineering team.
• Continuously iterate on the product based on performance data, market trends, and evolving regulatory landscapes.

Requirements

• Bring a minimum of 7 years of product management experience focused on building customer-facing and platform-based products.
• Demonstrate the ability to understand intricate technology and platform limitations and devise creative solutions within those boundaries.
• Show a proven track record of working effectively across functions with engineering, design, and business teams to deliver online products and services.
• Exhibit strong project management skills to rally multiple cross-functional teams towards successful launches while documenting trade-offs and keeping leadership informed.
• Possess a deep understanding of payments and lending ecosystems, including the associated regulatory and fraud risks.
• Have experience designing and scaling credit or capital-intensive products in a financial services context.
• Display a strong aptitude for data-driven decision making and rigorous analysis of product performance metrics.
• Be comfortable working in remote and distributed team environments where clear communication is essential.

Nice to have

• Direct experience with payments or lending products and their unique compliance requirements.
• Familiarity with tools such as JIRA, Quicksight, and FullStory for product analysis and tracking.
• A history of successfully building and scaling credit or capital products in a regulated industry.
• Prior experience working effectively on remote and distributed teams.

Practical notes

This role operates under a hybrid work model where team members divide their time between remote work and office work. You must live within commuting distance of the office to accommodate this arrangement. Hybrid teams may require in-office presence ranging from multiple times per week to as infrequently as once a month or quarter, depending on leadership decisions for the specific team. The hiring manager will provide specific details regarding the expected hybrid schedule for this position.