Product Manager, Payment Messaging

About the Role

We are seeking a Product Manager to help drive the evolution of our payments & banking technology. This is a role for a high-agency leader who thrives on technical complexity and demands perfection from their systems. You won't just build features; you will envision new ways of looking at decades-old problems, manage sophisticated relationships and product enhancements with industry experts, and help create the technical foundation on top of which the payments world is built.

In this role, you will work across the payments and banking industry to deliver products in the service of technologists on both sides of the network. This includes creating products in the realm of payments messaging, processor integration management, legacy system modernization, security, and compliance. You will need to understand users, products, and business needs to define new capabilities in our payments messaging offerings.

We seek a curious, tech-minded, and highly resourceful PM who can build and iterate solutions that are understood by both bankers and the engineers who build the system. You must be willing to drive technical rigor at the lowest level.

What You’ll Do

Product Strategy & Discovery: Meet with banks, processors, customers, partners, and engineering leaders to map complex technical problems to business needs. Define technical requirements, prioritize features, and create roadmaps that align with business objectives.

Manage complex implementation rollouts that span multiple continents to modernize banking, acquiring, and similar use-cases.

Ideate a sophisticated and configurable developer-friendly product interface that supports payments technologists, customer implementation specialists, and the business stakeholders that manage the finances. This interface will be used to interpret ISO8583, ISO20022, and similar messaging formats over a wide-array of protocols.

Understand, integrate with, and build on top of the pre-existing products, platforms, and concepts within the VGS ecosystem.

What You Bring

Experience: 10+ years of experience in payments technology as a software engineer, product manager, or related functions. Must have experience launching new initiatives that involve designing and building APIs, O11y, private networking, enterprise authentication systems, and other software developer-related technologies.

Deep experience working in banking and/or payments gateways in a way that is either directly interacting with the networks or the acquirer/issuer processors. The expectation is that you will have experience working with AS/400 servers, ISO8583, ISO20022, and similar technologies.

• T-Shaped Technical Mastery: This position requires a broad proficiency across the payments ecosystem.
• This includes DUKPT encryption for terminal/ATM messages, EBCDIC encoding, ISO8583 messaging, observability, and modern software development.
• It is required that you have deep knowledge related to one of these technologies in a way that is pertinent to payments messaging.

Technical Conviction: You have strong, well-founded opinions on software architecture. You are willing to advocate for systems that can be operationalized via configuration by an implementation/product team such that software systems do not require engineers to make minor changes on a per-implementation basis.

• Communication Skills: This position involves communicating new ideas to prospects, customers, executives, GTM leaders, and implementation teams.
• Therefore, strong written, verbal, and visual communication skills are required to be successful in this role.
• This includes writing technical documentation that is ready to be published online and that can be included in technical RFP presentations.

Mindset

• Born Inventor: You love designing and building.
• Your house is likely full of projects that you have figured out and put together from scratch.
• When you’re alone, you think of things to build and ways systems can be improved.

Abstract Problem Solver: When faced with a problem set, you break it down into the conceptual “building blocks” and solve the meta problem, not just the problem right in front of you.

• Technical Optimism: You view technical blockers as the list of steps that need to be taken in order to accomplish the goal.
• Integrating with legacy systems and technologies is strangely energizing.
• You look forward to it in the same way you would want to solve a puzzle without even having the source picture.
• You bring energy and a "can-do" spirit to the most difficult modernization challenges that the industry has to offer.

Nice to Have

• Experience with tokenization, payment processing, or security products
• BA/BS degree
• A knack for out-of-the-box thinking that thrives in a fast-paced startup environment
• Experience working with GTM teams to bring new products to market.
• Experience working in the payments/data tokenization space directly.

We're looking for passionate professionals who take pride in their craft and want to help grow a team tackling some of the most critical problems in payments. People who thrive here are curious by nature, unafraid of hard problems, and motivated by the chance to build something that matters at scale.

If you're driven to make a meaningful impact, work at the leading edge of payment technology, and grow your career alongside a team that values ownership, collaboration, and continuous learning, you'll feel right at home at VGS.