Product Lead, Platform

Staff-Level Product Lead

Astra is building mission-critical infrastructure for moving money at scale. Our platform processes billions in annual transaction volume with 99.9%+ uptime, powering real-time transfers, bank debits, card disbursements, and complex financial compliance systems. We provide APIs and automation tools that enable businesses to move money programmatically while maintaining strict regulatory requirements.

We're looking for a staff-level product lead to own Astra's platform layer – the APIs, developer experience, control plane, and foundational infrastructure products that sit above the rails and make Astra the Payments Cloud rather than just a payments gateway. This is an IC role with principal-level scope: you'll shape the architecture of how customers interact with Astra, how they configure and extend the platform, and how Astra scales to serve increasingly sophisticated builders.

You'll work directly with the leadership team and partner deeply with engineering, solutions, and go-to-market. The right person thinks like a platform architect, writes like an API designer, and ships like someone who has felt the consequences of a bad developer experience at 2am.

What You'll Own

• Astra's core API platform: authentication, versioning, pagination, rate limiting, error taxonomy, and the developer contracts that customers build on
• The control plane product: configuration surfaces, rule engines, programmable routing logic, and the levers customers use to customize money movement behavior
• Webhook and event architecture: delivery guarantees, retry logic, event schema design, and the observability customers need to build reliable integrations
• Developer experience: documentation quality, SDK surface, sandbox fidelity, onboarding flows, and the time-to-first-transaction metric
• Platform extensibility: how customers compose Astra's primitives – triggers, conditions, actions – to build complex payment workflows without custom engineering
• Platform reliability and SLA products: how Astra communicates uptime, exposes status, and gives customers visibility into degradation
• Long-term platform strategy: how Astra evolves from a multi-rail API into a programmable payments infrastructure layer, including agentic payment use cases

What You'll Do Day-to-Day

• Define and maintain Astra's API contract philosophy – versioning strategy, backwards compatibility standards, deprecation policies, and schema design principles
• Write detailed platform specs that engineering can ship from: precise, edge-case-aware, and grounded in how real customers build
• Own the platform roadmap – balancing foundational investments (auth, observability, extensibility) against customer-facing features and reliability work
• Conduct technical discovery with Astra's most sophisticated customers to identify platform gaps and extensibility needs
• Partner with engineering to review API design, maintain developer ergonomics standards, and hold the bar on platform quality
• Work with solutions and implementation teams to understand where customers get stuck, break, or build workarounds – and translate that into platform requirements
• Drive the developer experience roadmap in partnership with docs, solutions engineering, and DevRel functions as they mature
• Represent platform strategy in customer conversations, partnership discussions, and technical due diligence processes

What We're Looking For

Required Experience

• 6+ years of product management experience, with at least 3 years building developer-facing platform or API products at a technical infrastructure company
• Deep expertise in API design – REST, webhooks, event-driven architecture – and strong opinions about what makes a platform great to build on
• Experience owning a platform roadmap across authentication, configuration, extensibility, and observability layers
• Strong understanding of how infrastructure companies create lock-in through developer experience, not just features
• Comfort reasoning about systems-level tradeoffs: latency vs. consistency, configurability vs. complexity, generality vs. opinionation
• Track record of operating as a principal-level IC – setting direction, influencing without authority, and driving outcomes across engineering and go-to-market
• Exceptional written communication; you can produce a platform spec that is simultaneously a product document and a technical contract
• Payments context is a plus, not a requirement – but intellectual curiosity about how money moves is required

Preferred Experience

• Experience building platform products at a BaaS, payments infrastructure, or developer tools company
• Familiarity with the control plane / data plane architecture pattern as applied to developer platforms
• Background in workflow or rules-engine product design – if-this-then-that style programmability at the infrastructure layer
• Exposure to agentic AI use cases and how AI-native systems impose new requirements on payment infrastructure (context, controls, micropayment patterns)

Why This Role Matters

• You'll define the platform architecture of a company that has real ambitions to be category-defining infrastructure – the Snowflake of payments
• You'll work directly with the founding team and the company's first Director of Product, with significant influence on product culture and engineering culture
• Astra is profitable at Series A – the growth trajectory is funded, not a bet on future capital raises
• The platform problems here are genuinely hard: multi-rail orchestration, programmable money movement, agentic payment primitives – this is not a CRUD application

What We Offer

• Competitive compensation with equity in a growing fintech company.
• Remote-first culture with flexible working arrangements
• Small team, big impact — your work directly supports Astra's ability to scale responsibly
• Professional growth opportunities in compliance and risk management
• Mission-driven — build infrastructure that powers financial innovation while meeting the highest regulatory standards

Remote Work and Culture

Astra is a remote-first company hiring only within the U.S. We value thoughtful collaboration, clarity, and initiative. We're proud to be an equal opportunity employer and are committed to building a diverse and inclusive team.