Principal Product Manager - Zelle Platform

Principal Product Manager

At Early Warning, we've powered and protected the U.S. financial system for over thirty years with cutting-edge solutions like Zelle®, Paze℠, and so much more. As a trusted name in payments, we partner with thousands of institutions to increase access to financial services and protect transactions for hundreds of millions of consumers and small businesses.

Positions located in Scottsdale, San Francisco, Chicago, or New York follow a hybrid work model to allow for a more collaborative working environment.

Candidates responding to this posting must independently possess the eligibility to work in the United States, for any employer, at the date of hire. This position is ineligible for employment Visa sponsorship.

Overall Purpose

The Principal Product Manager is a leader responsible for the development and management of a group of products aligned with a customer segment and/or product solution. The role will build, align, and motivate a cross functional team to develop a common understanding of the customer's pain points and the passion to solve issues and develop innovative solutions that delight customers.

Essential Functions

• Leadership: Builds internal and external coalitions and alignment on product strategy and execution. Influences cross functional teams, executives and customer leadership with strong vision, strategy, and product execution.
• Customer Passion and Advocacy: Proactively assesses customer needs across the portfolio of products to maximize customer satisfaction. Routinely leverages feedback into insights; and builds products and services that delight and inspire.
• Drive Outcomes: Working closely across marketing, sales, analytics, design and development partners, drive strong go to market strategies to attain product revenue and client adoption targets. Owns internal financial targets and customer net promoter and satisfaction goals.
• Commitment to Risk Management: Oversees the integration of strong risk and security controls. Ensures compliance to laws and regulations.
• Technical Understanding: Able and adept at working directly with the technologists to deliver. Clearly defines requirements, grooms user stories, motivates technical teams and partners with technology closely.
• Support the company's commitment to risk management and protecting the integrity and confidentiality of systems and data.

Zelle® Event & Messaging Platform Product Management Focus :

In this technical product management role, the Principal Product Manager will be responsible for leading the core event data domain and messaging framework for the Zelle® Platform. The Principal Product Manager must have the product management skillset and technical acumen necessary to become the subject matter expert in Zelle® Platform technology. The ideal candidate will be comfortable engaging deeply with solutions architects and software engineers as well as collaborating with business, technical and operational stakeholders both internally and at Zelle® financial institution and reseller customers.

The Principal Product Manager will develop and execute a strategy to drive resilient, performant and scalable Zelle® event architecture—mitigating risk and improving service quality to support future growth. Must be an expert at busting down silos to fully assess customer impact, weigh tradeoffs, finalize product requirements and align the product roadmap with other Zelle platform and growth teams.

Minimum Qualifications

• Education and/or experience typically obtained through completion of a bachelor's degree
• Typically 12 or more years of related work experience
• Demonstrated experience in design thinking and agile development process and methodology
• Demonstrated cross functional collaboration experience.
• Proven experience in and passion for building and delivering great products.
• Demonstrated experience in setting a product strategy, roadmap and in meeting product revenue targets.
• Demonstrated experience driving alignment at the executive and client leadership level
• Excellent listening and execution skills
• Background and drug screen

Preferred Qualifications

• Master's degree
• Certifications in design thinking and/or agile.
• 3+ years of experience with at scale payment processing, data platforms, or event processing systems used by financial institutions or enterprise customers.
• Deep understanding of event-driven architecture patterns (event sourcing, pub/sub, CQRS) and modern messaging infrastructure (Kafka, Pulsar, RabbitMQ, or equivalent), with ability to engage credibly with engineering to influence design-level decisions.
• Demonstrated experience owning high-throughput, low-latency platform capabilities in production environments, processing millions of transactions per day, with direct accountability for availability and performance SLAs.
• Track record of defining and shipping developer-facing platform products—APIs, Webhooks, and SDKs—with a strong instinct for internal and external developer experience.
• Fluency in payments network concepts including authorization, clearing and settlement, message formatting standards and operational payment processing rails (card, ACH, RTP, wire, stablecoin & blockchain technology, etc.).
• Experience navigating platform governance in regulated environments, including schema versioning, event schema registries, audit requirements, and data residency constraints.
• Experience systems thinking, with the ability to consider end-to-end blast radius reduction when changing shared platform components.
• Proven ability to define and drive a product roadmap that delivers platform resiliency and scalability at increasing scale, while keeping technical debt to a minimum.
• Experience defining and tracking platform-level success metrics and translating them into actionable product priorities.
• Experience with Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), microservices and large platform migrations from on-premises to cloud services environments a plus.
• Experience identifying and productizing AI/ML applications within platform infrastructure—such as anomaly detection on event streams, intelligent routing or retry logic, and predictive alerting—with the ability to partner with data science and ML engineering teams to define feature requirements, evaluate model efficacy, and govern AI-driven decisioning within a regulated environment a plus.

The above job description is not intended to be an all-inclusive list of duties and standards of the position.

Physical Requirements

Early Warning works together in a highly collaborative office environment. As such, working conditions consist of a normal office environment. Work is primarily sedentary and requires extensive use of a computer and involves sitting for periods of approximately four hours. Work may require occasional standing, walking, kneeling and reaching. Must be able to lift 10 pounds occasionally and/or negligible amount of force frequently. Requires visual acuity and dexterity to view, prepare, and manipulate documents and office equipment including personal computers. Requires the ability to communicate with internal and/or external customers.

The base pay scale for this position in: Phoenix, AZ in USD per year is: $173,000 - $230,000. New York, NY/ San Francisco, CA in USD per year is: $207,000 - $242,000. Additionally, candidates are eligible for a discretionary incentive plan and benefits. This pay scale is subject to change and is not necessarily reflective of actual compensation that may be earned, nor a promise of any specific pay for any specific candidate, which is always dependent on legitimate factors considered at the time of job offer. Early Warning Services takes into consideration a variety of factors when determining a competitive salary offer, including, but not limited to, the job scope, market rates and geographic location of a position, candidate's education, experience, training, and specialized skills or certification(s) in relation to the job requirements and compared with internal equity (peers). The business actively supports and reviews wage equity to ensure that pay decisions are not based on gender, race, national origin, or any other protected classes.

Employee must be able to perform essential functions and physical requirements of position with or without reasonable accommodation.

Candidates responding to this posting must independently possess the eligibility to work in the United States at the date of hire.

Some of the Ways We Prioritize Your Health and Happiness

• Healthcare Coverage – Competitive medical (PPO/HDHP), dental, and vision plans as well as company contributions to your Health Savings Account (HSA) or pre-tax savings through flexible spending accounts (FSA) for commuting, health & dependent care expenses.
• 401(k) Retirement Plan – Featuring a 100% Company Safe Harbor Match on your first 6% deferral immediately upon eligibility.
• Paid Time Off – Flexible Time Off for Exempt (salaried) employees, as well as generous PTO for Non-Exempt (hourly) employees, plus 11 paid company holidays and a paid volunteer day.
• 12 weeks of Paid Parental Leave
• Maven Family Planning – provides support through your Parenting journey including egg freezing, fertility, adoption, surrogacy, pregnancy, postpartum, early pediatrics, and returning to work.

And SO much more