Senior Platform Product Manager

About the role

At Koalafi, we partner with merchants to offer flexible lease-to-own financing to consumers, helping merchants increase sales while giving customers more ways to pay over time. Every product experience we ship, for consumers, merchants, and internal teams, is built on a shared technical foundation that must be reliable, scalable, and easy to build on.

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

Qualifications

• 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

Skills

• Technical fluency
• Systems thinking
• Data-driven decision-making
• Collaboration and leadership
• Passion for innovation and efficiency

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

Pay

$137,000 - $185,000 per year (depending on experience and location)

Schedule

Full time