Senior Product Manager, Authorization Optimization

Description

The company is looking for a senior product manager to own its authorization optimization product area, where payments and fraud decisioning overlap.

The core goal is raising authorization rates for legitimate transactions.

This is a hands-on technical role. You will turn strategy into detailed requirements, define the data and API links with merchants, payment service providers and issuers, and act as the product voice in architecture talks.

You will work day to day with engineering and data science, and with go-to-market teams who take the product to merchants.

Responsibilities

• Set the authorization optimization roadmap from start to finish: choose priorities, plan delivery order, weigh tradeoffs, and explain the plan and reasoning to leadership, engineering and go-to-market staff.
• Decide where the company should build, orchestrate, partner with, or work directly with issuers, based on issuer behavior, merchant needs and regional payment conditions.
• Write detailed technical specifications, user stories and acceptance criteria, and run the backlog with engineering.
• Define and evolve the APIs, data models and integration points that carry authorization and decline data between merchants, PSPs, issuers and the platform.
• Find, assess and build partnerships with PSPs, gateways, acquirers, issuers, and data or technology vendors that widen coverage and deliver measurable merchant value.
• Build issuer and BIN intelligence on authorization performance, decline patterns and treatment results. Keep a quantified map of opportunities ranked by recoverable revenue.
• Lead issuer-specific decisioning for step-ups, 3DS, decline recovery and intelligent retries, and guide routing when merchants have several PSP or acquirer options.
• Work with data science to set requirements for risk-aware decisioning that weighs approval gains against fraud and chargeback exposure.
• Own measurable gains in authorization rates and recovered merchant revenue, and show the effect of each treatment through merchant proofs of value and issuer or BIN reporting.
• Work with sales, solutions and customer success to bring merchant feedback into the roadmap and help drive adoption.
• Keep up with card network rules, regulation and industry practice, and use that knowledge to sharpen requirements.

Requirements

• At least 5 years in product management, including owning a roadmap and delivering work end to end.
• Hands-on payments product experience covering issuer authorization behavior, with a solid grasp of decline recovery and retries, 3DS, and PSD2/SCA, including the coming move to PSD3/PSR, and a record of improving authorization performance.
• Experience writing detailed technical specs and defining APIs or data interfaces with engineering. Backend or high-volume transaction system experience is a plus.
• Strong analytical skills, comfortable working from transaction-level data and setting success metrics.
• Experience working closely with data science or analytics teams and turning their findings into product requirements.
• Proven record of influencing cross-functional stakeholders without direct authority.
• Clear written and spoken communication for both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Optional: experience at a payment processor, PSP, acquirer, card network, issuer or fraud or risk vendor.
• Optional: exposure to fraud, risk or digital identity products, including the tradeoff between false declines and fraud losses.
• Optional: experience defining requirements for ML-driven decisioning.
• Optional: familiarity with 3DS/EMVCo, tokenization, ISO 8583 and PSD2/SCA.
• Optional: B2B SaaS or enterprise e-commerce merchant experience.

Conditions

Remote position in the United States. Base pay depends on the pay zone of the work location, plus skills, experience, qualifications and current market conditions.

Tier 1 (NYC, SF Bay Area, Seattle): $165,000 to $205,000 per year in base salary.

Tier 2 (DC Metro, Austin, Chicago, Denver, Boston, Los Angeles, San Diego): $155,000 to $195,000 per year in base salary.

Tier 3 (all other US locations): $145,000 to $185,000 per year in base salary.

Eligible for a stock option grant of 7,000 options, depending on level and internal compensation guidelines.

Eligible for an annual performance bonus of up to 10% of base salary.

Accommodations are available on request for candidates with disabilities during hiring.

Benefits

• Unlimited discretionary time off.
• 401(k) match.
• Stock options.
• Annual performance bonus or commissions.
• 12 weeks of paid parental leave.
• On-demand therapy for employees and their dependents.
• Learning budget through Learnerbly.
• Health, dental and vision insurance.
• Flexible spending account (FSA).
• Short-term and long-term disability insurance.
• Life insurance.
• Company social events.
• Company swag.