Founding Product Manager

Dots ?; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Private medical insurance (dental &amp

Unlimited vacation

Regular team off-sites

401k plan

Job summary

Dots in San Francisco is hiring its first product hire to own the payouts product—from developer APIs to the payer dashboard. You’ll talk to customers to shape what to build, defend it with data, and set a roadmap with the founders and engineering.

You’ll be hands-on with product design, pricing, and packaging, and work directly with engineers to ship. The role requires a track record of taking a product from idea to paying customers and the instinct to push back when needed.

Qualifications

• 6+ years as a product manager, engineer or founder.
• Experience talking directly to customers and turning feedback into product decisions.
• Experience owning a roadmap and making prioritization decisions.
• Enough technical depth to review API designs with engineering.
• Hands-on product design experience, from flows and interactions down to screens.
• Experience owning pricing or packaging.
• Comfort staying close to what ships, including documentation, QA, product usage and support escalations.

Responsibilities

• Talk to customers and prospects to understand how they move money and where Dots creates value.
• Define and own the roadmap with the founders and engineering, balancing customer needs, technical constraints and business priorities.
• Own the developer-facing APIs and the dashboard experience used by customers.
• Own onboarding, verification and payout tracking for payees.
• Collaborate with engineering from problem definition through launch and QA releases.
• Price and package capabilities, decide when to automate recurring problems via product.

Skills

Customer interviews

Roadmap ownership

Pricing & packaging

Hands-on design

API & decisions

Cross-functional collab

Job description

About Dots

Dots (usedots.com) is a Series A fintech backed by Y Combinator and DCM, building payout infrastructure for marketplaces and digital platforms. In the past year, we have grown our revenues by over 400%, and have built a deep base of loyal customers.

Since our founding 4 years ago, we’ve moved nearly $3 billion per year to more than 1 million payees across 190+ countries, helping businesses onboard, pay and manage recipients around the world.

The role

You’ll own the product companies use to build and operate payouts on Dots, from the APIs developers integrate with to the dashboard their teams use to manage money movement, as well as the experience their payees go through to get verified and receive their money.

Your first job is to talk to enough customers to form a view on what we should build, then defend it.

You’ll decide what we build next, work directly with engineering to ship it and own pricing and packaging alongside the founders. You’ll also be hands‑on with product design, shaping flows, screens and interactions as you take ideas from problem definition through launch.

This is our first product hire. There is no roadmap waiting for you.

You report directly to the founders, who have strong opinions and expect you to push back on them.

What you’ll do

Customer discovery & product strategy

• Spend time with customers and prospects to understand how they move money, where Dots creates friction and what would make the product more valuable.
• Combine customer conversations, product data, support issues and company priorities into a clear point of view on what we should build next.
• Set and own the roadmap with the founders and engineering team, making tradeoffs between customer needs, technical constraints and business priorities.

Product & design

• Own the experience companies use to build and operate payouts on Dots, from developer-facing APIs to the dashboard their teams use day to day.
• Own the experience for people receiving money through Dots, including onboarding, verification, payout selection and tracking.
• Be hands‑on with product design, shaping flows, screens and interactions without relying on a dedicated product designer.

Shipping & execution

• Work directly with engineering from problem definition through launch.
• Write requirements, make product and API decisions, QA releases and measure whether what we shipped solved the problem.
• Stay close to support escalations and recurring operational issues so product decisions reflect what customers are actually experiencing.

Pricing & product operations

• Own pricing and packaging alongside the founders, including how existing and new capabilities should be charged for and packaged.
• Decide when recurring operational problems should be solved through product instead of continuing to handle them manually.
• Establish how Dots does product as our first product hire: how we gather customer insight, prioritize work, make decisions and ship.

About you

You’re comfortable operating without a roadmap and forming your own view of what the right answer should be.

You like talking to customers, getting deep into the product and working directly with engineers. You care about the details of what gets shipped, but you’re equally comfortable making larger strategic decisions about where the product should go.

You set a high bar, welcome strong opinions and are willing to push back when you disagree.

What you’ll bring

• 6+ years as a product manager, engineer or founder, including at least one product you took from nothing to paying customers.
• Experience talking directly to customers and turning what you hear into product decisions.
• Experience owning a roadmap and making difficult prioritization decisions.
• A track record of deciding what to build when there wasn’t an obvious answer.
• Enough technical depth to review API designs with engineering, understand the tradeoffs and influence the outcome.
• Hands‑on product design experience, from flows and interactions down to individual screens.
• Experience owning pricing or packaging.
• Comfort staying close to what ships, including documentation, QA, product usage and support escalations.

Bonus points if you have

• Worked in fintech or finance.
• Built developer-facing products or public APIs.
• Been a founder.
• Shipped product with a team of fewer than ten engineers.

Tech stack

You don’t need to write production code, but you should be comfortable working closely with engineers and understanding the systems you’re making product decisions about.

• Frontend: React
• Backend: Python
• Infrastructure: AWS, ECS
• Day-to-day tools: GitHub, Linear, Slack, Notion

What we provide

• Private medical insurance, including dental and vision
• Unlimited vacation policy
• Regular team off‑sites
• 401k plan