Senior Product Manager – Payments Platform

Role Overview

• Own strategy and roadmap for key components of ActBlue’s payments platform across the full transaction lifecycle: authorization, capture, settlement, reconciliation, refunds, chargebacks, disbursements, and error handling.
• Build and evolve core payment infrastructure, including payment primitives, APIs, processor integrations, and internal platform services that support fundraising products across ActBlue.
• Design systems that support multiple payment architectures, including PayFac-style and platform/ISV models, while ensuring compliance with campaign finance regulations.
• Partner deeply with Engineering to design scalable, resilient platform capabilities and translate complex technical requirements into clear product strategies and delivery plans.
• Work closely with Finance and Payments Operations to ensure settlement accuracy, reconciliation correctness, payout reliability, and effective financial risk management across millions of transactions.
• Define and own key platform metrics such as authorization rates, decline patterns, payout success, refund rates, processing costs, and financial accuracy.
• Analyze operational and payment performance signals to identify opportunities to improve authorization success, reduce failure loops, strengthen resiliency, and optimize platform behavior through routing strategies, retry logic, and improved error handling.
• Lead integrations with new processors, payment partners, and platform services to ensure the payments infrastructure remains scalable, resilient, and adaptable to evolving fundraising and regulatory requirements.
• Own the operational performance of the systems you help build by partnering with engineering and operational teams to diagnose complex payment failures, participate in incident response, and drive improvements that strengthen system reliability.
• Communicate product strategy, progress, risks, and outcomes clearly across technical and non-technical stakeholders, ensuring strong alignment across engineering, leadership, and operational teams.

Requirements

• 5+ years of product management experience, including ownership of complex technical systems or platform infrastructure.
• Deep experience working on payments systems or financial infrastructure, with strong familiarity with the full lifecycle of a transaction from initiation and authorization through settlement, reconciliation, refunds, chargebacks, and disbursements.
• Experience building or operating high-volume payments systems within a fintech, marketplace, or platform environment.
• Strong familiarity with the payments ecosystem, including card networks, processors, and payment rails such as ACH and RTP, as well as regulatory frameworks including PCI DSS, NACHA rules, and card network mandates.
• Technical fluency and comfort working with APIs, payment specifications, and platform architectures in close partnership with engineering teams.
• Experience delivering capabilities within core payment workflows such as authorization systems, refund architecture, retry logic, failure handling, payment routing, or multi-processor orchestration.
• Strong understanding of financial data systems, including reconciliation, settlement accuracy, and supporting finance and accounting workflows in high-transaction-volume environments.
• Data-driven product instincts and comfort analyzing operational and financial metrics such as authorization rates, decline patterns, payment success rates, processing costs, and financial accuracy.
• Strong systems thinking and the ability to design modular platform capabilities across complex, interconnected systems.
• Comfort operating in production environments, including experience diagnosing system failures, participating in incident response, and improving platform reliability and operational resilience.
• Proven ability to lead complex cross-functional initiatives involving engineering, finance, operations, and external partners.
• Extreme ownership mindset with the ability to proactively identify problems, navigate ambiguity, and drive complex initiatives from strategy through execution.
• Passion for leveraging technology to protect our democracy, and excitement about building financial infrastructure that enables grassroots fundraising for progressive campaigns and causes.

Tech Stack

• Ruby on Rails

Benefits

• Flexible work schedules and an unlimited time-off policy
• Fully paid and trans-inclusive health, dental, and vision insurance for employees and their families; plus fully-paid health reimbursement arrangement to use for out of pocket expenses and fully-paid short
• and long-term disability
• Fully paid basic and AD&D life insurance and a voluntary supplemental life insurance option
• Dependent and health care flexible spending account options
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP) benefits for employees
• Automatic 2% Employer-paid 401K contribution, plus up to an additional 6% match on employee contributions
• A minimum of three months paid medical, family and parental leave (for all new parents, adoptions included)
• Commuter or home-office benefits, including a $1,000 home-office setup allowance for all new full-time remote employees
• Additional perks including quarterly snack deliveries and digital subscriptions to the Boston Globe & New York Times