[Hiring] Director of Product Management, Payments @Guild

Role Description

Guild is hiring a Director of Product, Payments, to lead the team building how money moves across Guild. You'll own the strategy for Guild's payment network - the infrastructure that funds education between employers, Guild, and learning providers - and lead a team of product managers expanding our offering to a flexible menu of payment modalities that expands Guild’s ability to meet discrete finance needs in the context of a benefit. This is a leadership role with a broad remit: defining payment network strategy, leading a world-class team, and building the core of a product that impacts millions of learners in the US.

What You'll Do

• Payment Network Strategy & Ownership: Own the multi-year strategy for Guild's payment network — how users on all three sides of the marketplace fund education through Guild, spanning virtual cards, reimbursement, and other transaction modalities. Set the vision, make the calls on sequencing and investment, and be accountable for the outcomes.
• Team Leadership: Lead, coach, and grow a team of product managers across payment modalities and platform capabilities. Set the bar for product craft, build a strong operating rhythm, and develop PMs into leaders.
• Zero-to-One and Scale: Guide the team from concept through vendor selection, pilot, and scale - shipping quickly, learning, and iterating - while knowing when to step in on high-stakes decisions and when to let the team run.
• AI-Native Product Development: Set the expectation that your team builds and operates with AI where appropriate, and identify where AI materially improves the product itself, and at what level.
• Vendor & Network Partnerships: Help facilitate Guild's relationships with processors, card networks, and money movement partners. Assist commercial negotiations on economics, SLAs, and roadmap alignment, and manage the partner portfolio over time.
• Payments Economics & Pricing: Partner with stakeholders on pricing, packaging, and business cases; challenge assumptions and bring an informed outside perspective to Guild’s monetization strategy.
• Cross-Functional Leadership: Represent payments strategy in executive and leadership-level conversations. Align Engineering, Finance, Legal, Commercial, and Operations around a shared roadmap, and resolve trade-offs across them.
• Compliance, Risk & Program Governance: Partner with Legal, Compliance, and Finance to set the governance framework for card issuing and money movement - spend controls, reconciliation, settlement, fraud prevention, and program oversight - and make sure the team builds to it.
• Funding Service Optimization: Set and drive the strategy for Guild's funding service, improving speed, reliability, working capital efficiency, and cost per transaction.
• Global Scale: Build capability sets with a global-first approach, serving as a subject matter expert on globalization, including specific expertise around currency handling, localization, and international markets.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of product management experience, including significant time building payments products - card issuing, virtual cards, money movement, or B2B payment flows - at a fintech or payments company or in an embedded payments role at a platform company. Bonus if this experience has been global.
• 5+ years managing product managers, with a track record of developing PMs, running a healthy team, and raising the quality bar.
• Fluency in the mechanics of card issuing and money movement, and the vendor ecosystem behind them. Experience with cross-border payments is a plus.
• Demonstrated success setting and executing a multi-year payments strategy, including business case building, and taking products from zero to launch and scaling through ambiguity.
• Experience facilitating third-party vendor and network partnerships end to end - sourcing, negotiating, and managing them - and partnering with commercial and legal teams on terms and economics.
• Comfort building and defending financial models; able to work as a peer with Finance on unit economics, pricing, and working capital, and to challenge the status quo when the numbers say so.
• Able to go deep with engineers on API design, integration architecture, and build-vs-buy trade-offs; engineering leaders trust your judgment and instincts.
• You use AI tools daily in your own work and have a point of view on where they change how product teams operate. You can separate the real opportunities in payments (risk, reconciliation, support, emerging agentic payment flows) from the hype, and you hold your team to a high bar for using it well.
• Equally comfortable presenting strategy to the executive team, digging into transaction-level data with your PMs, and sitting with a customer to understand why a payment flow fails them.

Benefits

• Access to low-cost, high-quality health care options through Collective Health and Kaiser (due to coverage limitations, Kaiser is currently only available in CA & CO).
• Access to a 401k to help save for the future.
• Vacation policy to rest and recharge.
• 8 days of fully-paid sick leave, to take the time to heal and or recover.
• Family-friendly benefits, including 12 weeks of parental leave for non-birthing parents and 18-20 weeks for birthing parents; 2-week ramp-up period for when employees return from a leave of 6 weeks or more; as well as employer-paid short-term and long-term disability, employer-sponsored life insurance, fertility and caregiving benefits.
• Well-rounded wellness benefits including free and low cost mental health resources and financial wellbeing support services.
• Education benefits and tuition assistance to help your future development and growth.
• Our home and headquarters in Denver, but some of our roles allow for remote work, allowing us to reach the best talent across the US.