Responsibilities
- Own and drive the roadmap for the Shared Tech platform
- Lead prioritization and facilitate thoughtful tradeoffs with engineering and product stakeholders, balancing developer velocity, reliability, and long-term platform health
- Align engineering leads and product teams on what platform investments matter most and why
- Lead ongoing discovery with internal engineering teams to surface needs, blockers, and gaps, then translate them into cohesive, reusable platform capabilities
- Lead delivery as the embedded product manager for the Shared Tech engineering team
- Partner continuously with engineering to define the what and the why, while empowering the team to determine the how
- Maintain a prioritized backlog with crisp epics and stories, clear acceptance criteria, and measurable outcomes
- Define success metrics and measurement plans
- Shape the platform to enable every product team to build faster and more reliably
- Event Bus - own the strategy and roadmap for Koalafi's internal event infrastructure; ensure it is reliable, well-documented, and easy for product teams to adopt and extend
- Communications Gateway - own the platform that routes and delivers consumer and merchant communications across channels; ensure it is scalable, auditable, and supports the needs of product teams without requiring bespoke solutions
- Modernization Priorities - partner with engineering to identify, scope, and sequence the highest-impact investments in platform modernization; create the clarity needed for teams to migrate off legacy systems safely and incrementally
- Drive operational excellence by treating performance, reliability, observability, and auditability as foundational requirements
Requirements
- 5+ years of product management experience with a focus on building and shipping technical, platform, or shared-services products
- Strong systems thinker with enough technical fluency to earn engineers' trust, translate their needs into a roadmap, and make sound tradeoffs between short-term wins and long-term platform health
- Demonstrated ability to lead and influence cross-functional teams toward a common goal without direct authority, with excellent written and verbal communication across technical and non-technical audiences
- Comfortable operating in ambiguous environments - able to create structure, clarity, and momentum where none exists
- Experience using data and instrumentation to inform prioritization and evaluate the success of platform investments
- Strong passion for AI and LLMs and their potential to unlock efficiencies; actively follows the space and brings a point of view on where these technologies can create meaningful leverage in platform products and internal workflows
Nice to Have
- Experience in fintech, lending, or regulated-industry engineering environments
- Familiarity with observability tooling, data infrastructure, or API platform work
- Exposure to developer experience programs, internal developer portals, or platform engineering practices
- Background working with or alongside Security and Compliance in a financial services context
Benefits
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage
- 20 PTO days + 11 paid holidays
- 401(k) retirement with company matching
- Student Loan & Tuition Reimbursement
- Commuter assistance
- Parental leave (maternal + paternal)
- Inclusion and Associate Engagement Programs
Work Arrangement
Hybrid — Richmond, VA, Arlington, VA, Remote (U.S.)
How You’ll Work
Partner closely with the Shared Tech Lead to set direction, make tradeoffs, and deliver high-quality platform improvements, Conduct ongoing discovery with internal engineering and product teams to understand pain points, integration needs, and unmet gaps, Collaborate with teams across Consumer, Merchant, Credit, and Operations to understand how shared platform capabilities support their roadmaps and where they fall short, Partner with Security and Compliance to ensure platform services meet the company's regulatory and security requirements, Build internal communication practices around platform changes, adoption guides, migration timelines, and deprecation notices, so teams can plan around platform evolution
Why choose Koalafi
A career at Koalafi means opportunities to tackle exciting challenges every single day. We take pride in a culture of innovation, trust, and ownership. You'll get outside your comfort zone, build meaningful relationships, and most of all, take charge of projects that ultimately help people get the things they need most.
Who we are & what we value
We focus on what’s most important, We set clear expectations and deliver, We embrace challenges to reach our full potential, We ask, “How can this be better?”, We move fast together
