Payments Product Manager

We’re currently looking for a Payments Product Manager who will take a key role on our United States location-neutral team. You’ll serve as CardFlight’s payments domain expert. Bringing leadership, expertise, and experience across transaction networks and methods, processor integrations and certifications, compliance mandates, card brand relationships, and emerging payment standards, while serving as the connective tissue among the payments team, engineering, and the broader product organization.

You’ll interpret product strategy, technical specifications and translate complex requirements into engineering-ready stories. This is a product management role at its core — you will own the strategy, requirements, and roadmap for our payments infrastructure. The nature of payments integrations and certifications means a meaningful portion of your time also involves project-level execution, but the job is defined by product thinking, not task coordination.

In this role, we value someone who brings deep payments expertise and a genuine customer-centric product mindset, combined with deep understanding of the context and constraints in payment transaction processing, and a pragmatism and solution-oriented mindset to create and ship elegant solutions despite lots of complexity below the surface.  You thrive in technical ambiguity, operate with a high degree of self-sufficiency, and understand that in payments, the details matter as much as the strategy.

What You’ll Do

Payments Strategy & Certification Ownership

• Providing product thought leadership on how all transactional components of our product function, how that maps to processor integrations, our roadmap for end-to-end certification processes, while working alongside the certification team on execution.
• Managing processor integration and certification processes end-to-end, from intake paperwork through testing and delivery, including negotiating scope and requirements with certification analysts at major processors.
• Serving as the primary point of contact with processors and card brands for compliance matters, emerging standards, and production issues, with the communication skills and relationship-building discipline to represent CardFlight effectively in high-stakes technical conversations.
• Reviewing card brand compliance bulletins and emerging payments standards, developing a pragmatic point of view on where the product needs to evolve, surfacing and actioning those recommendations proactively.
• Acting as CardFlight’s internal expert on topics like emerging payment methods and standards, EMV kernels, certification intake requirements, and processor integration architecture, helping the broader team build knowledge.
• Managing many concurrent workstreams across multiple active certifications and processor integrations simultaneously without losing attention to detail.

Technical Requirements & Spec Interpretation

• Reading and interpreting raw specification documents from card brands and processors, and translating them into clear, engineering-ready requirements, user stories, and Product Requirements Documents without requiring them to be pre-interpreted by someone else.
• Identifying compliance obligations from standards bodies like EMVCo and PCI-DSS, card brand rules and processor integration specs, and proactively surfacing requirements before they become production issues.
• Assessing how new user-facing features impact processor integrations and certification requirements, and flagging those dependencies early in the product development process.
• Advocating for payments capabilities such as emerging authentication standards, network tokenization, or new payment methods by building the product case before they become urgent priorities.