Senior Product Manager - Payments Platform

Kraken International; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Payward is seeking a product manager to shape the future of its payments platform, spanning shared backend and client-facing integration surfaces. You will work with engineering to turn vision into a sequenced roadmap and align internal teams across banking, partnerships, and compliance to deliver scalable pay-in and payout rails.

The role requires 5+ years of platform-focused PM experience, strong payments knowledge, and the ability to write API specs and docs that engineers respect.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of product management experience, ideally in a platform, API or infrastructure role.
• Working knowledge of payments: pay-ins, payouts, PSPs and bank rails.
• Read RFCs, challenge architecture decisions and write API specs engineers respect.
• Experience shipping developer-facing products such as APIs, SDKs, or embeddable UI.
• Clear, structured writing that stakeholders can act on.
• Ability to manage many stakeholders and build alignment without direct authority.
• Comfort using data to set goals and measure platform adoption.

Responsibilities

• Own the product vision and roadmap for Payward payments platform across backend and integration surfaces.
• Translate client requirements into a sequenced, high-impact roadmap with clear milestones.
• Collaborate with engineering to deliver the target vision and plan client milestones.
• Prioritize competing needs with transparent trade-offs and rationales.
• Shape end-to-end client experience from initial talks to go-live with minimal hand-holding.
• Coordinate with banking and partnerships to standardize integrations across entities.
• Incorporate compliance, risk, and legal constraints early in the roadmap.
• Define and track metrics like time-to-launch, go-live speed, and rails adoption.

Skills

Product management

Payments knowledge

Technical fluency

Developer-facing products

Documentation

Stakeholder management

Data-driven

Job description

Building the Future of Open Finance

Payward - the parent company behind Kraken, NinjaTrader, Breakout, xStocks, Payward Services and CF Benchmarks - has spent the last 15 years building one of the most modern and globally accessible financial infrastructure platforms in the industry, built to advance an open, global financial system.

Before you apply, we encourage you to explore our culture page to understand what drives us and how we work.

The team

Payward Services is an enterprise infrastructure platform that enables companies to seamlessly integrate trading, payments, funding, and digital asset services through a single unified system. It provides coordinated liquidity, custody, compliance, risk management, and settlement capabilities, reducing operational complexity for fintechs, banks, brokerages, and payment providers.

Payward's Payments & Blockchain team owns the first and last mile of every dollar that moves in or out of its products. That means dozens of banking partners, PSPs and local rails powering deposits and withdrawals for millions of users.

The team is looking for a product manager to shape the future of this platform, from the architecture underneath to the API layer internal clients build on. At the center is Payward's in-house PSP: a scalable, multi-tenant payments backend with hosted pages, SDKs, embedded components and direct APIs, so any Payward business can plug in and reach pay-in and payout rails worldwide.

The opportunity

• Own the product vision and roadmap for the Payward payments platform, covering both the shared backend and the integration surfaces internal clients build on (hosted pages, SDKs, embedded components and direct APIs)

• Map requirements across internal clients and use them to evolve the platform's vision and capabilities so it serves a growing range of use cases

• Partner with engineering to turn the target vision into a sequenced, high-impact roadmap, with milestones every client team can plan against

• Prioritize across competing client needs, make the trade-offs visible, and say no with a clear rationale

• Shape the client experience end to end, from first conversation to go-live, so teams can adopt the platform without heavy hand-holding

• Work with the banking and partnerships teams so each new PSP or bank integration is built once on the platform and reaches every Payward business

• Bring compliance, risk and legal requirements across Payward's entities and jurisdictions into the roadmap early, before they become launch blockers

• Set and track platform success metrics, such as time to launch a rail for an existing client, time for a new client to go live, share of rails available through the platform, and payment success rates

What you bring

• 5+ years of product management experience, ideally in a platform, API or infrastructure role where your customers were other internal teams or developers

• Working knowledge of payments: pay-ins and payouts, PSPs and acquirers, bank rails (ACH, SEPA, Faster Payments, SWIFT and local methods), and how money flows between them

• Strong technical fluency. You can read an RFC, challenge an architecture decision, and write an API spec that engineers respect

• Experience shipping developer-facing products such as APIs, SDKs, or embeddable UI components

• Clear, structured writing. You turn complex system designs into docs that product, compliance and business stakeholders can all act on

• Skill at managing many stakeholders with different priorities, and building alignment without direct authority

• Comfort working with data to set goals and measure platform adoption and performance

Nice to haves

• Experience at a PSP, payment orchestrator or payments infrastructure company, or building one in-house

• Background with multi-tenant SaaS or B2B2C platforms

• Familiarity with crypto, stablecoins or on/off-ramps

• Experience working across multiple regulated legal entities or licensing regimes

Unless a specific application deadline is stated in the job posting, applications are accepted on an ongoing basis.

Please note, applicants are permitted to redact or remove information on their resume that identifies age, date of birth, or dates of attendance at or graduation from an educational institution.

We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories for employment on our team, assessing candidates in a manner consistent with the requirements of the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.

Our commitment

Payward is powered by people from around the world and we celebrate the diverse talents, backgrounds, contributions, and unique perspectives that everyone brings to the table. We hire based on merit, seeking out people with the right abilities, knowledge, and skills for the job. We encourage you to apply for roles where you don't fully meet the listed requirements, especially if you're passionate or knowledgeable about crypto.

We may ask candidates to complete job-related skills or work-style assessments as part of our hiring process. These assessments evaluate competencies relevant to the role and are applied consistently across candidates for similar positions. Results are considered alongside experience and interviews, and are not the sole basis for any employment decision.

As an equal opportunity employer, we don't tolerate discrimination or harassment of any kind, whether based on race, ethnicity, age, gender identity, citizenship, religion, sexual orientation, disability, pregnancy, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic as outlined by federal, state, or local laws.

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