Principal Product Manager, Payments

Principal Product Manager, Payments

New York, NY; San Francisco, CA

Flex is a growth-stage, NYC headquartered FinTech company that is creating the best rent payment experience. It's hard to believe that it's 2026 and paying rent on time is expensive, inflexible, and difficult. We're here to change that! Flex enables our users to pay rent throughout the month on a schedule that better fits their finances and budget. Our mission is to empower as many renters as possible with flexibility over their most significant recurring expense. After deliberately keeping a stealth profile as we built up unprecedented investor support and an enthusiastic user base, we are looking for motivated individuals to help us keep our mission growing. Will you be a part of the team?

About the Role

We're hiring a Principal Product Manager, Payments to lead one of the most critical areas of our infrastructure: how money flows in and out of Flex. You will oversee our end-to-end payments platform - including transaction processing, payment-related fraud and disputes - and ensure it evolves into a strategic growth and margin lever.

This role is ideal for someone who thinks in platforms and systems, understands payment mechanics, and knows how to balance user experience, risk, and cost. You'll work closely with Platform and Risk leadership to drive innovation and performance across payment rails, dispute automation, and fraud prevention, while enabling seamless user experiences and future expansion.

What You'll Do

• Shape the cross-functional platform product strategy. Map how future products fit together into a coherent architecture, and help ensure they're built with speed and stability in mind.
• Own Flex's payments platform strategy and roadmap end-to-end: vaulting, authorization, processing, reconciliation, and refunds across all payment methods (card, wallet, ACH).
• Drive down payment processing costs through better routing, smarter retry logic, and fraud/dispute efficiency - without sacrificing UX or resilience.
• Build and scale fraud detection and dispute infrastructure to reduce losses while minimizing false positives and user friction.
• Expand our payment method coverage, ensuring all channels (cards, bank transfers, wallets) are supported with the right controls, guardrails, and visibility.
• Partner with Risk, Finance, Ops, and Engineering to align on business goals and build resilient, compliant, and scalable payment solutions.
• Lead and grow a high-performing product team, coaching PMs while maintaining a strong bar for ownership and quality.
• Define success metrics and build dashboards, tooling, and processes to measure performance across cost, reliability, speed, and loss rates.
• Champion clear thinking, technical depth, and rigorous prioritization in a fast-moving, high-volume environment.

Key Qualifications

• 7+ years of product experience, with at least 3+ years in payments, fraud, or platform product roles at a fintech, bank, or B2B2C fintech products.
• Deep understanding of the payments ecosystem: authorization, retries, tokenization, payment gateways, fraud systems, and card networks.
• Demonstrated ability to balance user experience, cost optimization, fraud risk, and regulatory requirements in product decisions.
• Strong technical acumen and systems thinking - you've worked closely with engineers to design reliable, scalable systems.
• Proven success as a player-coach: you've managed PMs and enjoy mentoring while rolling up your sleeves when needed.
• Bonus: Experience working with Payment processors, building dispute automation, or expanding payment options in regulated environments.

Compensation Flex takes a market-based approach to pay, ensuring compensation is commensurate with a candidate's experience and our internal leveling guidelines. For candidates located in our Tier 1 (NYC/Bay Area) markets, the base salary pay range for this role is below. Flex utilizes a geographic pay differential based on a cost of labor index. If you are located outside of the cities listed below, your starting pay will be adjusted to align with the market conditions of your specific geographic zone. Please speak with your recruiter for additional information regarding the specific range for your location.

Tier 1 (NYC/Bay Area)

$248,000 - $310,000 USD

Life at Flex

We understand that it takes a diverse team of highly intelligent, curious, determined, empathetic, and self aware people to grow a successful company. Our HQ is located in New York City, but we have employees located throughout the US, Australia, Canada and South America. We are growing quickly, but deliberately, with a focus on building an inclusive culture. Our dynamic team has incredible perspectives to share, just as we know you do, and we take great pride in being an equal opportunity workplace.

Roles posted in New York, San Francisco, and Salt Lake City are hybrid positions with on-site expectations of 2-3 days per week in our local offices. For candidates outside of these areas, you may be eligible for our relocation assistance program.

For full-time U.S. employees we offer:

• Competitive medical, dental, and vision
• Company equity
• 401(k) plan with company match
• Unlimited paid time off + 13 company paid holidays
• Parental leave
• Free Flex subscription

For full-time non-U.S. employees, we offer:

• Competitive compensation + company equity
• Unlimited PTO