Senior / Staff Product Manager – Payments
FIS · United Kingdom
About the Role
Sits within a newly acquired startup building an AI-enabled, autonomous banking platform for Tier-1 financial institutions within the banking group. The Product Manager is the single-threaded product owner for the Payments component: vision, roadmap, requirements, prioritization, and measurable outcomes from discovery through production adoption. Requires deep UK or US payments expertise, an engineering foundation, and end-to-end ownership of what we build and why. The first assignment is a live Tier-1 bank payments program with a signed-scope deadline. This is not a program- or delivery-management role: client-program orchestration sits with the Forward Deployed team, and engineering owns architecture and implementation.
Key Responsibilities
Payments Strategy & Roadmap
- Own the direction: Define the multi-year Payments strategy and rolling roadmap across UK and US requirements; decide what to build, defer, simplify, reuse, or deprecate.
- Own the scheme calendar: Productize non-discretionary change — Nacha rules, ISO 20022 deadlines, scheme mandates — before it becomes urgent.
- Keep the roadmap on track and define success: STP, success and return rates, latency, availability, reconciliation breaks, onboarding lead time, adoption.
Payments Domain & Client Leadership
- Be the SME: Serve as the internal product authority on how rails, schemes, participants, processors, settlement models, and operating rules work end to end.
- Problem-solve with clients: Join client working sessions to define what to build — whiteboard the actual payment lifecycle, expose missing controls and edge cases, and identify the minimum viable reusable capability.
- Guard the platform: Convert recurring client and field signal into reusable payment primitives, not client-specific forks; countersign any client commitment that binds the roadmap before it is promised.
- Challenge constructively: Push back on clients and internal experts with evidence; document decisions so they stay made.
Technical Product Definition
- Write the contract: Author PRDs and decision documents; define payment APIs, events, data and state models, error semantics, and acceptance criteria.
- Sweat the semantics: Partner with engineering on idempotency, duplicate handling, retries, ordering, cut-offs and value dates, settlement finality, and recovery.
- Own the boundaries: Define product contracts with Ledger, Customer, Reg & Compliance, Orchestration, Reconciliation, Data, and Command Center.
- Respect the split: This role owns what, why, priority, and acceptance criteria; engineering owns architecture, implementation, and estimates.
Required Experience
Payments Expertise
- Deep, hands-on expertise in UK rails (Faster Payments, Bacs, CHAPS, Open Banking) or US rails (ACH/Nacha, Fedwire, FedNow, RTP, CHIPS); near-term roadmap weights UK depth.
- Working command of ISO 20022, settlement and finality, cut-offs and value dates, returns and reversals, exceptions, reconciliation, and scheme onboarding and certification.
- Practical exposure to more than one payment type (instant, batch/ACH, wire, direct debit, cross-border). Strongly preferred: working knowledge of the other market's rails.
Technical Foundation
- 4+ years owning a technical product or platform end to end, including at least one taken personally through launch, adoption, and iteration.
- Engineering background or equivalent hands-on record: typically 3+ years building, shipping, and operating production software — not coordinating its delivery.
- Fluent in APIs, event-driven and distributed systems, data and state modeling, reliability, security, and observability; reads architecture diagrams without a translator.
Operating Style
- Strong ownership mindset — owns outcomes, not tasks; a product owner who ships, not a requirements librarian. High agency; writes the playbook when none exists.
- Technically credible and commercially grounded — earns trust with senior engineers, bank product and operations leaders, scheme experts, and risk and compliance teams, and executives. Clear writer: turns complex rules into decisions that are hard to misinterpret.
- AI-native — uses analytics, telemetry, and AI-assisted workflows as the default operating mode for discovery, prototyping, documentation, and decisions, not a side experiment.
Impact & Scope
- Direct impact on core banking platforms used by Tier-1 global institutions — starting with a live Tier-1 payments program
- High autonomy and accountability within a small, senior team, paired with a senior engineering lead
- Work shipped directly to production, supporting high-consequence financial transactions
Why This Role
This role offers the autonomy, ownership, and technical depth of a startup, combined with the scale, stability, and long-term impact of FIS. You will define how some of the world's largest banks initiate, move, settle, reconcile, and control money on a next-generation enterprise platform.
Why Join FIS?
- Build next-generation payment capabilities for leading global banks.
- Work in a startup-style environment backed by the scale of FIS.
- Own products that directly support high-value, mission-critical financial transactions.
- Partner with a senior team of engineers, payment experts, and banking leaders.
Privacy Statement
Sourcing Model
Recruitment at FIS works primarily on a direct sourcing model; a relatively small portion of our hiring is through recruitment agencies. FIS does not accept resumes from recruitment agencies which are not on the preferred supplier list and is not responsible for any related fees for resumes submitted to job postings, our employees, or any other part of our company.
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