Associate Technical Product Manager

Smartleaf; Boston (MA); Hybrid; USD 100,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Smartleaf is seeking a detail-oriented professional to join the application team, shaping how portfolios respond to market events and user actions in real time. You’ll translate complex domain models into a clear user experience for financial advisors.

You’ll distill multi-action correctness into understandable flows, write docs, and partner with developers to ensure robust, scalable solutions. The role is hybrid, Boston-area focused.

Qualifications

• 1–3 years of building production applications or a degree requiring strong quantitative skills
• Excellent interpersonal skills working with different kinds of stakeholders
• Demonstrated ability to reason about quantitative data and systems with complex domain logic
• Clear and concise written and verbal communication
• Ability to think through multiple alternative solutions
• Demonstrated ability to pick up new skills as needed

Responsibilities

• Explain issues, potential solutions and tradeoffs in ways that make sense to a variety of stakeholders
• Write up bug reports and feature requests that expose the underlying user needs
• Work with the development team to design a system that will help our users get things done and hold up under real world conditions
• Write product documentation that helps users get up and running quickly
• Organize the backlog in a way that facilitates prioritization
• Work with development teams to assure smooth delivery and proactively expose risks
• Track and analyze product outcomes

Skills

Interpersonal skills

Quantitative reasoning

Written and verbal communication

Analytical thinking

Learning agility

Problem solving

Education

Degree in math / statistics / engineering / computer science

Tools

JIRA

Confluence

Google Docs

Wiki.js

Figma

Miro

SQL

Superset

Google Sheets

Job description

What You'll Be Doing

As a member of our application team, you'll be at the intersection of domain knowledge, a complex data model and a stream of real-world events. Every day, every portfolio is acted on simultaneously by market movements, user actions and system processes. Your job is to make sure the right things happen in the right order, and that edge cases are handled correctly so that financial advisors can trust what they're seeing.

You'll spend a lot of your time figuring out what correctness means when multiple actions hit a portfolio at once. You'll need to distill this complexity into a clear experience that allows financial advisors to understand the impact of their choices and present the best possible information to their clients.

You'll Be a Great Fit If You

• Have a natural ability to think and reason about complex systems
• Are able to dive into an unfamiliar domain and quickly build up working knowledge of how multiple components interact
• Enjoy taking a cloud of complex problems and making them clear and straightforward
• Are a proactive and effective learner who habitually analyzes and improves your own process

How We Work

We hire carefully because this domain is complex and correctness matters. The people who thrive here care deeply about understanding problems. They are comfortable talking things through with others, even when they know their understanding might be incomplete. They can make meaningful progress even before they fully understand the system. They strike a practical balance that keeps work moving: they can ship a fix, stabilize a production fire, or get an MVP out the door and keep thinking critically about the problem afterward, turning it over until they reach a root cause or a clearer understanding.

Primary Responsibilities

• Explain issues, potential solutions and tradeoffs in ways that make sense to a variety of stakeholders
• Write up bug reports and feature requests that expose the underlying user needs
• Work with the development team to design a system that will help our users get things done and hold up under real world conditions
• Write product documentation that helps users get up and running quickly
• Organize the backlog in a way that facilitates prioritization
• Work with development teams to assure smooth delivery and proactively expose risks
• Track and analyze product outcomes

Requirements

• 1-3 years of experience building production applications OR a degree requiring strong quantitative skills (e.g. math, statistics, engineering, computer science)
• Excellent interpersonal skills working with different kinds of stakeholders
• Demonstrated ability to reason about quantitative data and systems with complex domain logic
• Clear and concise written and verbal communication
• Ability to think through multiple alternative solutions
• Demonstrated ability to pick up new skills as needed.

Nice To Haves

• Prior fintech experience is a plus but not necessary to thrive in this role.

Tools You'll Use

Expected proficiency: you don't need prior experience with the tools listed below. It is sufficient to be familiar enough with similar tools to pick any of them up within a few days.

• JIRA to track work in progress
• Confluence, Google Docs and Wiki.js to maintain documentation
• Figma to design mockups
• Miro to visualize workflows and conduct interactive meetings
• Google sheets, Superset and some SQL to analyze usage data and produce charts and graphs
• Open source coding agents + local LLMs

Location

We prefer candidates who are willing to work in a hybrid environment. Candidates in the Boston area should expect to work in-office 2 days/week for the first 6 months. Candidates outside the Boston area should expect to travel to Boston for 1 week at a time several times in the first six months and 3x per year thereafter.

Visa Sponsorship

Smartleaf is unable to provide visa sponsorship now or in the future. This includes, but is not limited to, H-1B, F-1 (including OPT/CPT), J-1, or any other employment-based immigration or work authorization sponsorship. Candidates must have current and ongoing authorization to work in the United States without sponsorship.

Salary Range

$100,000 - $120,000 /yr depending on relevant experience