Principal Product Manager, Real-Time Payments Platform
Job Description
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Who we are:
Shape a brighter financial future with us.
Together with our members, we’re changing the way people think about and interact with personal finance.
We’re a next-generation financial services company and national bank using innovative, mobile-first technology to help our millions of members reach their goals. The industry is going through an unprecedented transformation, and we’re at the forefront. We’re proud to come to work every day knowing that what we do has a direct impact on people’s lives, with our core values guiding us every step of the way. Join us to invest in yourself, your career, and the financial world.
The Role:
At SoFi, we're on a mission to help our members get their money right and become a Top 10 Financial Institution. Beyond that, we're building the "AWS of Banking" — modern, scalable platforms that power financial services across every SoFi product.
We're looking for a Principal Product Manager to own SoFi's real-time payments platform — the infrastructure that enables instant, 24/7/365 money movement for our members and commercial clients. You'll define the vision and strategy for how SoFi sends and receives money in real time, and build the platform capabilities that make fast, transparent, and reliable transfers the default experience.
This role sits within Bank Platform, SoFi's shared financial infrastructure team. Your platform serves every line of business — from Consumer to Commercial Banking, Invest and Lending and everything in between — enabling them to move money faster, compliantly and more cost effectively without each building their own rails.
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.
- 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.