Product Manager - Payments

Job description

We are making travel effortless. Join us. Whether it's to visit the people closest to us, starting an exciting adventure, or a career-defining business trip, travel is an essential part of our lives. Yet we've all experienced the aches and pains of getting to our destination. Today, more than 4 billion airline passengers rely on technology that hasn't kept up with the expectations of the modern connected traveller. That's why we've started to rebuild the infrastructure that underpins the travel industry. We're on a mission to unravel travel, simplifying systems and building the tools that will make the future of travel effortless. We were part of Y Combinator S18's cohort and we are backed by Benchmark, Blossom, Index Ventures and Kima Ventures, a fantastic set of investors that has helped build some of the world's largest companies. Payments at Duffel Our Payments team looks after the infrastructure that powers our travel operations: payment acceptance, supplier settlement, reconciliation, commission tracking and payouts, billing, and more. These are some of the hardest and most interesting challenges Duffel is facing as we operate as a global travel platform. About the role As the Product Manager for Payments, you'll own the roadmap for the operational backbone of our Payments product. The role is largely internal. You'll work closely with Finance, Engineering, and Operations to optimise settlement, billing, commissions and reconciliation, and to build the platform services that other Duffel teams, and eventually external partners, rely on. There's a customer-facing dimension too, but the bulk of the work is making the inside of the product as well-engineered as the outside. You'll spend most of your time with engineering, define the weekly goals and milestones for the product squad, work closely with internal stakeholders (Finance especially), and bring real depth to a team that values getting the detail right. You'll own the overall Payments roadmap, to shape where your areas go next, including parts of the product we've barely touched yet. What we're looking for - You're fluent in payments without being wedded to the rails. You understand how money moves (settlement, reconciliation, commissions, FX, chargebacks) but you're more energised by building great internal product on top of that than by optimising payment rails for their own sake. - You're a builder. Most of what this team needs, we build rather than buy. You like designing the systems, automated commission flows, supplier reconciliation, billing, that Finance, Operations and eventually external partners rely on. - You translate between worlds. A big part of this job is sitting between Finance and Engineering: turning finance narratives into technical requirements, technical realities into language Finance and Ops can act on, and getting both sides to genuinely understand each other. - You prioritise ruthlessly. This is a small, in-demand team (three engineers) constantly trading internal needs against customer-facing work. You're good at deciding what matters now and saying no to the rest. - You sweat the detail. Reconciliation logic, commission edge cases, audit trails: this is the kind of work that energises you rather than drains you. - You shape product direction. You can take a roadmap area, work out where it should go and why, and drive it. - You've got commercial instinct. You can spot when something we've built for ourselves (like reconciliation) could become a product customers would pay for. - You're API-literate. You don't need to write code, but you can have a meaningful conversation with engineering about how systems actually work. - You handle ambiguity, breaking complex, undefined problems into a clear way forward, and use both quantitative and qualitative analysis to back your calls. - You think being challenged on your assumptions makes you better, and that challenging others helps them grow. - Nice to have: exposure to travel-specific payments (BSP, IATA, virtual cards, agency settlement). Useful, not essential. Some reasons why you’ll love working here: 🏡 Work From Anywhere - work abroad for part of the year 🛩️ Duffel Travel Allowance - because building in travel should come with travel perks 🍼 Enhanced parental leave 🧘 Sabbatical options - proper time to recharge 🪩 A Shoreditch office near Liverpool Street + regular team socials 💰 Competitive salary + potential equity You’ll join a smart, kind, ambitious team building something meaningful in travel with real ownership, autonomy, and the chance to shape how we hire as we scale and we think that’s pretty exciting. We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. 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