Senior Product Manager - Data Platform and Integrity

Forward Financing is a financial technology company based in Boston, Massachusetts, on a mission to unlock the capital that fuels small businesses across America. They are seeking a Senior Technical Product Manager, Data Platform & Integrity to lead data strategy and governance across their product teams, ensuring robust data management and integrity in their applications.

Responsibilities:

• Embed Data Strategy: Partner with vertical Product Managers and Engineering leads during the design phase of new features. You will ensure that every Product Requirement Document (PRD) includes a defined data strategy—specifying exactly how data is captured, stored, and validated
• Design Review: Act as a technical reviewer for major product initiatives, asking the critical questions: “How does this change the data model? Does this create a duplicate field in core applications? How will we report on this?”
• Standardization: Establish the standards for how our Product team defines data requirements, ensuring consistency in how we track loan lifecycles, customer statuses, and financial transactions across different squads
• Data Modeling: Oversee the logical data model within our Core Applications and Salesforce. You will ensure that as we scale, our schema remains clean, normalized, and efficient, preventing "tech debt" in the form of messy or redundant data fields
• Lineage & Overrides: Own the logic for Data Lineage and Data Overrides. You will define the rules for which system is the "source of truth" when data conflicts occur and ensure we have an audit trail for manual overrides in core apps
• Governance at the Source: Implement "Governance by Design" by working with Engineering to build validation rules and constraints directly into the application layer, preventing bad data from ever entering our ecosystem
• The Analytics Bridge: Serve as the primary liaison between the Product/Engineering organization and the Analytics/Data Science teams. You will ensure that upstream application changes do not break downstream reporting or AI models
• Translation: Translate complex analytical requirements (e.g., specific features needed for a risk model) into actionable engineering tickets for the Core Application teams
• Data Availability: Ensure that the data generated by our products is accessible, documented, and structured in a way that allows the Analytics team to self-serve, reducing the dependency on ad-hoc engineering support

Requirements:

• 5+ years of strategic product management experience in FinTech, lending, or a regulated financial services environment
• 2+ years of direct, dedicated experience establishing or leading a formal Data Governance program, Data Stewardship practices, or Master Data Management (MDM) strategy
• Expertise in data quality assurance, data lineage, and metadata management, with experience implementing data catalogs or data dictionary tools
• Solid understanding of lending data lifecycles (e.g., application, servicing, collections) and the compliance requirements (TCPA, FDCPA, etc.) inherent in revenue-based financing or related credit products
• Demonstrated experience with API integrations and managing complex, high-volume data flows between disparate systems
• Strong analytical skills with a proven track record of using data and governance principles to define product strategy and measure results
• Bachelor's degree in Business, Finance, Computer Science, or a related quantitative field