Senior Product Manager

Job description

**This is a remote-friendly role. Ideally, candidates will sit in the following states: AL, AZ, CA, CO, DC, DE, FL, GA, ID, IL, LA, MA, MO, NC, NH, NJ, NV, NY, OR, OH, PA, RI, SC, TX, VA, WA, WI.** **At this time, Tapcheck does not provide sponsorship for employment-based visas (e.g., H-1B, L-1, TN, etc.). Therefore, candidates must already possess the right to work in the United States without the need for employment-based visa sponsorship now or in the future.** **About the Job** Tapcheck moves real money to hourly workers every day — across bank rails and card rails, inside cutoff windows, at volumes that grow every quarter. The rails work. What's still being built is the platform underneath them: a payments layer designed as services, with clean contracts, defined SLAs, and the ability to absorb the next rail, the next product line, and the next order of magnitude without being rewritten. We're hiring a Senior Product Manager who knows payments at the settlement level and builds like a platform engineer thinks. You'll own money movement end to end — bank payment types, the payroll card program, and payout experiences — and you'll build it as reusable infrastructure that other teams consume through APIs rather than one-off integrations. This is a hands-on seat. You'll write the requirements yourself, work embedded with engineering through delivery, and stay accountable through production validation. You'll also work with real ambiguity. Documentation is incomplete, a lot of current state lives in people's heads, and problems arrive as a recurring symptom rather than a scoped request. You'll be expected to decide with partial information, write down what you assumed, and move — not wait for someone to hand you clarity. And because nothing here ships without Finance, Legal, Payment Operations, Engineering, and often an external partner agreeing, you'll need to build that alignment yourself, ahead of the meeting rather than in it. Nobody in this seat succeeds on authority; they succeed on being consistently right in writing and easy to say yes to. If you have under-the-hood knowledge of how funds actually settle, you obsess over failure paths because that's where payment systems break, and you'd rather build the service properly than ship the feature twice — this is the seat. **What You'll Do** **Own money movement end to end** - Bank payment types: Same-Day ACH, RTP, wires, push-to-card — including returns, rejections, retries, cutoff windows, settlement confirmation, and reconciliation - The payroll card program: issuing, BIN eligibility, cardholder lifecycle, network compliance, processor configuration - Employer and worker payout surfaces, including file upload, funding windows, and failure handling - Routing and waterfall logic — the tradeoffs between speed, cost, and settlement certainty that decide whether a rail is trustworthy **Build it as a platform** - Design payments capability as services with explicit API and data contracts, so new rails, products, and partners plug in rather than requiring rework - Define the abstractions that keep the platform rail-agnostic — so adding a rail is a configuration and integration exercise, not a re-architecture - Define and own the SLAs and performance benchmarks payment services run against, and build the observability to prove them - Design for multi-tenant scale, backward compatibility, and clean migration paths where changes have blast radius across consuming teams **Write and deliver** - Produce the detailed requirements yourself: PRDs, user stories, acceptance criteria, state and error handling, field-level mapping, technical scoping - Work embedded with engineering day to day — discovery, refinement, sprint planning, standup, demos — answering questions in the moment rather than next cycle - Direct augmented engineering capacity: define work precisely enough for distributed teams to build correctly, sequence it, review what comes back, hold the bar - Carry work through production validation. Read the logs, query the data, walk the flow, confirm the fix held **Test, measure, and prove it** - Define success metrics and guardrails before you build, not after - Run real experiments where they apply — payout selection, funding flows, card activation, error and retry messaging, default rail selection — with honest sample sizing and honest readouts, including the ones that don't go your way - Use staged rollout as the instrument where experimentation isn't safe: canary and percentage releases, holdback cohorts, pre-declared guardrail metrics, and rollback criteria agreed in advance - Know the difference between the two, and be able to explain to a stakeholder why a given change gets one and not the other - Build the analytics and instrumentation you need to answer questions yourself instead of filing a request **Bring order to ambiguity** - Take problems that arrive as a symptom, a complaint, or a recurring incident and turn them into scoped, sequenced, owned work - Decide with incomplete information, state your assumptions plainly, and revisit them when evidence changes - Distinguish reversible decisions from irreversible ones and spend your rigor accordingly - Reverse-engineer current state where documentation is thin, and leave it better documented than you found it **Build alignment across the company and with partners** - Get to yes with Engineering, Payment Operations, Finance, Legal and Compliance, Customer Success, and Business Development — pre-wiring decisions with the people who have to live with them rather than surfacing them cold in a meeting - Write the document that makes the decision easy: options, tradeoffs, a clear recommendation, and what you need from each party - Negotiate contested ownership boundaries in good faith, and make the seams explicit so they stop being relitigated - Manage the product relationship with sponsor bank, processor, card network, and data aggregator counterparts - Write clearly enough that the CEO, CFO, and GC can make decisions from what you put in front of them **Design for resilience** - Treat edge cases and failure scenarios as first-class design work, not error states bolted on at the end - Build compliance, auditability, and risk mitigation into the design from the start — Reg E, NACHA operating rules, network rules, sponsor bank requirements — working with Legal rather than after them - Own the metrics for payment health: success rate, time-to-land, cost per transaction, return rate, exception volume. Report them without being asked **What You've Done** **Required** - Spent 7+ years in product management, with 5+ years building payments or financial infrastructure product - Explained exactly how money moves and becomes final across ACH, RTP, wires, and card rails — under-the-hood knowledge of funds flows and domestic settlement - Owned live bank payment integrations end to end, including return and exception handling - Built payments capability as reusable services with real API and data contracts — not features layered on someone else's rails - Worked directly with sponsor banks, processors, or card networks, through technical integration and through commercial and compliance obligations - Wrote the detailed requirements themselves for payment systems that shipped: PRDs, stories, acceptance criteria, edge cases, field-level mapping - Scaled a payment system through significant volume growth, and can describe what broke and what they changed - Brought clarity to a genuinely ambiguous 0→1 problem and built scalable B2B product from scratch — can point to a situation where nobody knew what the problem was and describe how they made it tractable - Designed, ran, and read out A/B tests, with sample sizing and significance discipline sharp enough not to be fooled by a flat result, and knew when experimentation was the wrong tool for an irreversible change. Comfortable with staged and canary rollouts, holdbacks, and guardrail metrics as the alternative - Built alignment across functions that didn't report to them, on decisions where the parties started out disagreeing — and can describe how they actually did it - Read API contracts and data models, followed a data flow end to end, evaluated third-party integrations, and held their own with engineers on architecture — strong technical fluency - Obsessed over edge cases, failure scenarios, migration paths, backward compatibility, and performance benchmarks — systems thinking as a default mode - Shipped in agile with real accountability for delivery, not just definition - Owned a production payment incident as the product person - Used AI tools to compound their own output, with genuine curiosity about where AI fits into payment systems **Preferred** - Earned Wage Access, payroll, or on-demand pay background - Card issuing or payroll card program depth — BIN management, cardholder lifecycle, network compliance, processor operations - Treasury, ledger, reconciliation, or cash management product experience - Experience directing distributed or contracted engineering capacity - SQL or scripting self-sufficiency; pulled and analyzed their own data - Hands-on with experimentation and analytics tooling — feature flagging, product analytics, and instrumentation they specified themselves - Familiarity with Reg E, CFPB guidance, NACHA operating rules, PCI, state money transmission, or open banking frameworks - Built at a 50–500 person company where the financial platform was still being assembled - Bachelor's in Computer Science, Engineering, Business, or a related field **About Tapcheck** Tapcheck is a digital platform offering an easy and convenient way to access on-demand earnings early. Available at no cost to employers, our app-based on-demand pay solution helps relieve the financial stress that many employees experience on a daily basis. The Tapcheck team is passionate about our mission to improve financial wellness and boost business productivity. By giving workers the ability to transfer wages they've earned directly to their bank account or pay card without waiting for payday, Tapcheck eliminates the need for high-interest payday loans or employer-funded cash advances. **How We Get Things Done** Our core values act as a steadfast guide, directing our decisions and anchoring our actions. We consider these values non-negotiable, especially when it comes to our hiring process. - **Humility**: We believe in the power of humility. We value team players who are down-to-earth, respectful, and open to learning from others. Our employees approach challenges with a positive attitude, acknowledging their strengths and weaknesses while celebrating the achievements of their colleagues. - **Grit**: We admire individuals with grit – those who demonstrate unwavering determination and resilience in the face of obstacles. At Tapcheck, we take pride in overcoming challenges together, pushing the boundaries of what is possible, and embracing failure as an opportunity for growth. - **Raising the Bar:** Continuous improvement is at the heart of our culture. We are committed to setting high standards and pushing ourselves to exceed them. We seek employees who are innovative and strive for excellence, constantly seeking ways to enhance our products, services, and processes. - **Striving for Growth:** We foster an environment that encourages personal and professional development. Our employees are driven to learn, grow, and adapt to new circumstances. We support individuals who take initiative, seek out new challenges, and actively contribute to their own growth and the growth of the company. **Why Join Tapcheck?** - Mission that matters. We're changing how Americans access their pay — giving workers financial flexibility without the debt trap of payday loans. - Flexible PTO. No accrual caps, no counting days. Take the time you need. - 10 paid holidays. Including both Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve. - Comprehensive health coverage. Medical through Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas (PPO and HDHP options, HSA-eligible with employer contribution), plus dental and vision through MetLife. - FSA, Basic Life/AD&D, and an Employee Assistance Program (EAP). - 401(k) with a 100% match up to 3% of your salary, through Mutual of America. Eligible after 90 days. - A team that lives its values. Humility, grit, and a genuine drive to raise the bar — every day. **Compensation** Compensation at Tapcheck is competitive and benchmarked to your role and the market. We're committed to a total rewards package that reflects your impact. Full details are shared as part of our hiring process. *Tapcheck, Inc. provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training.*