Principal Product Manager, Real-Time Payments Platform

What you'll do

• Own the vision, strategy, and roadmap for SoFi's real-time payments platform, including FedNow, Fedwire, instant debit (Visa Direct, Mastercard Send), and future real-time rails.
• Scale real-time capabilities to new business lines — champion the real-time payments services internally, evangelize the value of Bank Platform adoption to other business units, and build a roadmap to onboard new use cases so that all relevant SoFi products benefit from real-time money movement capabilities.
• Partner with Risk and Compliance and Operations to ensure real-time payments are secure, compliant, and resilient and every penny is accounted for.
• Manage vendor and partner relationships — including Galileo (Payment Hub), the Federal Reserve (FedNow, Fedwire), The Clearing House (RTP), and card network partners — to influence roadmaps, negotiate terms, and ensure SoFi's needs are met.
• Drive operational excellence — define SLAs, monitor platform health, reduce failure rates, and build operational tooling that enables support teams to resolve issues quickly.
• Instrument and measure — define the metrics that matter (transaction success rate, speed, funds availability, cost per transaction, fraud rates, complaints per rail) and build the data infrastructure to track them.

What you'll need

• Must-Have:
  • 8+ years of product management experience, with significant time in payments, financial infrastructure, or money movement platforms.
  • A deep understanding of payment rails — you can explain the difference between FedNow, Fedwire, RTP, ACH, and card-based instant payments in your sleep. You understand message formats, settlement mechanics, cutoff times, and regulatory requirements for each.
  • Platform product management experience — you've built infrastructure or platform products that serve multiple internal or external customers, not just a single consumer surface. You think in APIs, contracts, and capabilities, not just screens.
  • Experience with payment orchestration — routing logic, fallback strategies, rail selection, transaction lifecycle management. Ideally you've worked with or built a payment hub or gateway.
  • Vendor and partner management chops — you've managed relationships with processors, networks, or infrastructure vendors. You know how to influence a partner's roadmap when you're not their biggest customer.
  • Comfort with compliance and risk — you understand AML/KYC/OFAC requirements for real-time payments, Reg E implications, and how to design for compliance without killing the user experience.
  • Strong analytical skills — you use data to identify problems, size opportunities, and make decisions. You can define and instrument metrics from scratch when the data doesn't exist yet.
  • Excellent communication — you can translate complex technical infrastructure into clear narratives for executive leadership, business partners, and operations teams.
• Nice-to-Have:
  • Experience at a bank, neobank, or bank-as-a-service provider (not just a fintech that rides on someone else's charter).
  • Familiarity with Galileo's platform (Payment Hub, Cyberbank Core) or similar core banking processors.
  • Experience building for both consumer and commercial (B2B) use cases on the same platform.
  • Background in real-time gross settlement (RTGS) systems, cross-border payments, or correspondent banking.
  • Technical depth — you can read an API spec, review an architecture diagram, or write a SQL query to investigate an issue. You don't need to code, but you're credible with engineers.