Senior Product Manager

Tapcheck is a digital platform that provides employers and workers with convenient access to earned wages before payday, supporting financial wellness and productivity. The Senior Product Manager will own money movement across bank payment types, payroll cards, and payout experiences while building reusable payments infrastructure, APIs, and operational capabilities. The role requires hands-on product delivery, experimentation, production validation, cross-functional alignment, and resilience, compliance, and risk management for high-volume payment systems.

Responsibilities:

• Bank payment types: Same-Day ACH, RTP, wires, push-to-card — including returns, rejections, retries, cutoff windows, settlement confirmation, and reconciliation
• The payroll card program: issuing, BIN eligibility, cardholder lifecycle, network compliance, processor configuration
• Employer and worker payout surfaces, including file upload, funding windows, and failure handling
• Routing and waterfall logic — the tradeoffs between speed, cost, and settlement certainty that decide whether a rail is trustworthy
• Design payments capability as services with explicit API and data contracts, so new rails, products, and partners plug in rather than requiring rework
• Define the abstractions that keep the platform rail-agnostic — so adding a rail is a configuration and integration exercise, not a re-architecture
• Define and own the SLAs and performance benchmarks payment services run against, and build the observability to prove them
• Design for multi-tenant scale, backward compatibility, and clean migration paths where changes have blast radius across consuming teams
• Produce the detailed requirements yourself: PRDs, user stories, acceptance criteria, state and error handling, field-level mapping, technical scoping
• Work embedded with engineering day to day — discovery, refinement, sprint planning, standup, demos — answering questions in the moment rather than next cycle
• Direct augmented engineering capacity: define work precisely enough for distributed teams to build correctly, sequence it, review what comes back, hold the bar
• Carry work through production validation. Read the logs, query the data, walk the flow, confirm the fix held
• Define success metrics and guardrails before you build, not after
• Run real experiments where they apply — payout selection, funding flows, card activation, error and retry messaging, default rail selection — with honest sample sizing and honest readouts, including the ones that don't go your way
• Use staged rollout as the instrument where experimentation isn't safe: canary and percentage releases, holdback cohorts, pre-declared guardrail metrics, and rollback criteria agreed in advance
• Know the difference between the two, and be able to explain to a stakeholder why a given change gets one and not the other
• Build the analytics and instrumentation you need to answer questions yourself instead of filing a request
• Take problems that arrive as a symptom, a complaint, or a recurring incident and turn them into scoped, sequenced, owned work
• Decide with incomplete information, state your assumptions plainly, and revisit them when evidence changes
• Distinguish reversible decisions from irreversible ones and spend your rigor accordingly
• Reverse-engineer current state where documentation is thin, and leave it better documented than you found it
• Get to yes with Engineering, Payment Operations, Finance, Legal and Compliance, Customer Success, and Business Development — pre-wiring decisions with the people who have to live with them rather than surfacing them cold in a meeting
• Write the document that makes the decision easy: options, tradeoffs, a clear recommendation, and what you need from each party
• Negotiate contested ownership boundaries in good faith, and make the seams explicit so they stop being relitigated
• Manage the product relationship with sponsor bank, processor, card network, and data aggregator counterparts
• Write clearly enough that the CEO, CFO, and GC can make decisions from what you put in front of them
• Treat edge cases and failure scenarios as first-class design work, not error states bolted on at the end
• Build compliance, auditability, and risk mitigation into the design from the start — Reg E, NACHA operating rules, network rules, sponsor bank requirements — working with Legal rather than after them
• Own the metrics for payment health: success rate, time-to-land, cost per transaction, return rate, exception volume. Report them without being asked

Requirements:

• Spent 7+ years in product management, with 5+ years building payments or financial infrastructure product
• Explained exactly how money moves and becomes final across ACH, RTP, wires, and card rails — under-the-hood knowledge of funds flows and domestic settlement
• Owned live bank payment integrations end to end, including return and exception handling
• Built payments capability as reusable services with real API and data contracts — not features layered on someone else's rails
• Worked directly with sponsor banks, processors, or card networks, through technical integration and through commercial and compliance obligations
• Wrote the detailed requirements themselves for payment systems that shipped: PRDs, stories, acceptance criteria, edge cases, field-level mapping
• Scaled a payment system through significant volume growth, and can describe what broke and what they changed
• Brought clarity to a genuinely ambiguous 0→1 problem and built scalable B2B product from scratch — can point to a situation where nobody knew what the problem was and describe how they made it tractable
• Designed, ran, and read out A/B tests, with sample sizing and significance discipline sharp enough not to be fooled by a flat result, and knew when experimentation was the wrong tool for an irreversible change. Comfortable with staged and canary rollouts, holdbacks, and guardrail metrics as the alternative
• Built alignment across functions that didn't report to them, on decisions where the parties started out disagreeing — and can describe how they actually did it
• Read API contracts and data models, followed a data flow end to end, evaluated third-party integrations, and held their own with engineers on architecture — strong technical fluency
• Obsessed over edge cases, failure scenarios, migration paths, backward compatibility, and performance benchmarks — systems thinking as a default mode
• Shipped in agile with real accountability for delivery, not just definition
• Owned a production payment incident as the product person
• Used AI tools to compound their own output, with genuine curiosity about where AI fits into payment systems
• Earned Wage Access, payroll, or on-demand pay background
• Card issuing or payroll card program depth — BIN management, cardholder lifecycle, network compliance, processor operations
• Treasury, ledger, reconciliation, or cash management product experience
• Experience directing distributed or contracted engineering capacity
• SQL or scripting self-sufficiency; pulled and analyzed their own data
• Hands-on with experimentation and analytics tooling — feature flagging, product analytics, and instrumentation they specified themselves
• Familiarity with Reg E, CFPB guidance, NACHA operating rules, PCI, state money transmission, or open banking frameworks
• Built at a 50–500 person company where the financial platform was still being assembled
• Bachelor's in Computer Science, Engineering, Business, or a related field