Principal Product Manager, LeanX

Lean; Dubai; Hybrid; AED 350,000 - 550,000; Full time

Job summary

Lean is seeking a Principal Product Manager for LeanX, our cross-border payments and stablecoin infrastructure, to shape day one direction and drive scale. You will own strategy, write specs, and partner with engineering in Sarajevo and commercial teams in Dubai, with regular travel to both locations.

You will work across regulation, engineering, product and commercial to build a defensible platform that handles corridors, liquidity, and onboarding at scale.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in product management, including senior ownership of B2B or infrastructure products.
• Experience in cross-border payments, remittance, payouts, treasury, or stablecoin and digital asset infrastructure.
• Strong technical fluency: comfortable with APIs, system design conversations and the trade-offs engineers face.
• A track record of taking products from early stage to scale, ideally in a startup or new business line.
• Comfort working in regulated environments and treating compliance and licensing as product inputs.
• Clear, concise written communication. You write the specs and strategy documents yourself.
• Experience working with distributed engineering teams across time zones.
• High agency and good judgment under ambiguity.
• Experience in the GCC, South Asia or other emerging-market payment corridors is a plus.
• Experience building with AI tools to automate product and team workflows is a plus.
• Arabic is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Own product strategy for LeanX across all its product lines: what we build, why, and in what order.
• Turn strategy into clear specs, priorities and roadmaps the engineering team can execute against.
• Make the call when priorities change, with a clear view of the team's capacity and the trade-offs involved.
• Help shape LeanX's long-term strategy and communicate it across the company.
• Build a cross-border platform that can compete with the leading global payout networks.
• Make it scale: more volume, more clients and more corridors without rebuilding each time.
• Automate treasury operations (pre-funding, liquidity, FX and reconciliation) so they no longer depend on people moving money by hand.
• Define the technical infrastructure a cross-border platform needs, and guide engineering to build it.
• Make it easy for clients to integrate and go live: APIs, documentation, sandbox and onboarding.
• Treat regulation, licensing and partner coverage as part of the product, so the platform is defensible.
• Own the roadmap for stablecoin infrastructure: wallets as a service, on-ramps and off-ramps, stablecoin acceptance and stablecoin payouts.
• Help decide which adjacent opportunities to pursue and when, and say no to the ones that would distract us.
• Bring Lean and LeanX together by keeping one clean platform across product lines and licenses.
• Set up automation for routine coordination and client onboarding workflows.
• Be the first stop for product questions from clients, the commercial team and engineers.

Skills

Years of product management

Cross-border payments

APIs and systems design

Product lifecycle to scale

Regulated environment

Written specs & strategy

Distributed engineering teams

Low ambiguity decision making

GCC / emerging markets knowledge

AI tooling for product workflows

Arabic language (plus)

Job description

About the Job

Lean is hiring a Principal Product Manager to own product for LeanX, our cross-border payments and stablecoin infrastructure business.

This is a startup inside a scale-up. LeanX is early, and you would be shaping it from close to day one: setting product direction, deciding what we build and in what order, and working directly with engineering to get it built. You would not be starting from zero. You would have Lean's infrastructure, licences, clients and leadership behind you.

Volume is growing quickly and our first large clients are going live. Today, much of what makes the business work is pushed through by hand by the leadership team. Your job is to turn that into a product the team can build, scale and defend. The hard problems here sit between regulation, engineering, product and commercial, so you need to be comfortable thinking across all four at once.

You will work as a member of the LeanX leadership team, and partner closely with our engineering team in Sarajevo and our commercial team in Dubai. Regular travel to both is expected.

About Lean

Lean is the leading financial infrastructure provider in the Middle East. We power some of the region's largest companies with APIs that enable payments, account verification, financial data access, and other critical financial infrastructure.

What started as the region's pioneering Open Banking platform and quickly became the de facto leader in account aggregation and payment initiation in the region is now becoming something bigger: a multi-product infrastructure company powering payments, data, and lending across MENA.

We've processed billions of dollars in transactions. We're trusted by 450+ clients - from Tabby and Tas'heel to Hungerstation - and backed by General Catalyst, Sequoia, and Shorooq. Our $67.5M Series B was just the beginning. We're expanding into new markets, opening offices, acquiring businesses, and building capabilities that didn't exist here before.

About LeanX: LeanX is Lean's cross-border and stablecoin business. Our clients are remittance companies, exchange houses and businesses moving money across borders, mostly for person-to-person remittance and business payouts. LeanX operates under Lean's regulated entities and is built by a dedicated engineering team in Sarajevo.

Responsibilities

• Product strategy and leadership

  • Own product strategy for LeanX across all its product lines: what we build, why, and in what order.

  • Turn strategy into clear specs, priorities and roadmaps the engineering team can execute against.

  • Make the call when priorities change, with a clear view of the team's capacity and the trade-offs involved.

  • Help shape LeanX's long-term strategy and communicate it across the company.

• Cross-border payments platform

  • Build a cross-border platform that can compete with the leading global payout networks.

  • Make it scale: more volume, more clients and more corridors without rebuilding each time. Launching a new corridor should be a repeatable process, not a project.

  • Automate treasury operations (pre-funding, liquidity, FX and reconciliation) so they no longer depend on people moving money by hand.

  • Define the technical infrastructure a cross-border platform needs, and guide engineering to build it.

  • Make it easy for clients to integrate and go live: APIs, documentation, sandbox and onboarding.

  • Treat regulation, licensing and partner coverage as part of the product, so the platform is defensible.

• Stablecoin-native infrastructure

  • Own the roadmap for stablecoin infrastructure: wallets as a service, on-ramps and off-ramps, stablecoin acceptance and stablecoin payouts.

  • Help decide which adjacent opportunities to pursue and when, and say no to the ones that would distract us.

• Connecting Lean and LeanX

  • Make sure LeanX builds on Lean's core infrastructure where it should, rather than rebuilding what already exists.

  • Keep one clean platform across stablecoin and fiat, across licences and across product lines as it grows.

  • Bring ways of working closer together across the two teams.

• Working with commercial and engineering

  • Be the first stop for product questions from clients, the commercial team and the wider company, so engineers can focus on building.

  • Work with commercial on the pipeline: what each client needs to go live and what that means for volume.

  • Set up automation for routine coordination. This is not a ticket-and-follow-up job.

What we're looking for

• 8+ years in product management, including senior ownership of B2B or infrastructure products.

• Experience in cross-border payments, remittance, payouts, treasury, or stablecoin and digital asset infrastructure.

• Strong technical fluency: comfortable with APIs, system design conversations and the trade-offs engineers face.

• A track record of taking products from early stage to scale, ideally in a startup or new business line.

• Comfort working in regulated environments and treating compliance and licensing as product inputs.

• Clear, concise written communication. You write the specs and strategy documents yourself.

• Experience working with distributed engineering teams across time zones.

• High agency and good judgment under ambiguity.

• Experience in the GCC, South Asia or other emerging-market payment corridors is a plus.

• Experience building with AI tools to automate product and team workflows is a plus.

• Arabic is a plus.

Why Join us?

We're building the financial infrastructure for MENA. Not as a slogan, as a fact.

Since 2019, we've become the first regulated Open Banking and Open Finance company operating across the UAE and Saudi Arabia. We've processed billions of dollars. We connect millions of accounts. We enable companies like Binance, Careem, and Etisalat to build products that were previously impossible in this region.

Our recent $67.5M Series B from General Catalyst and Sequoia isn't just validation: it's fuel. We're expanding into new markets, launching new products, and setting the pace for what financial innovation looks like in MENA.

We solve hard problems. We move fast. We hold ourselves to a high standard. And we're looking for people who've done this before to help us do it right.

If you're motivated by building something that lasts, not just something that scales, Lean is where you need to be.

Not only do we offer competitive salaries, private healthcare, and flexible office hours, but we also insist that every member of the team hold a meaningful equity stake in the business to ensure long-term alignment. We'd love you to join us for this journey!

Lean is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status.

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