Senior Product Manager, International Rapid Response Payment Systems at GiveDirectly

What you’ll do:

Payments Product Strategy and Roadmapping

• Own the product vision, roadmap, and prioritization for international payments infrastructure.
• Translate strategic objectives into actionable product goals, features, and success metrics.
• Regularly evaluate and refine product-market fit in the context of fast-evolving program and country needs.

Investigate and Innovate Global Payment Channels:

• Identify, assess, and recommend international payment solutions that can reach populations in fragile and underserved markets.
• Develop partnerships with global and regional payment aggregators, mobile money platforms, remittance providers, and stablecoin or crypto partners.
• Pilot and evaluate alternative transfer modalities, including blockchain-based or decentralized finance (DeFi) approaches, particularly in contexts where traditional banking access is limited.

Build and Scale Payment Infrastructure:

• Design systems for integrating new payment rails into GD’s operations, ensuring compliance, security, and scalability.
• Define and document technical and operational requirements for payment implementation in humanitarian and development settings.
• Collaborate with engineers and data teams to ensure seamless integration with targeting, verification, monitoring, and payments systems.

Research & Landscape Analysis:

• Map and compare emerging technologies and vendors in the payments space, with a focus on rapid deployment and cross-border capabilities.
• Conduct technical due diligence on vendors and track trends in stablecoin, mobile finance, and blockchain applications.

Cross-functional Collaboration:

• Work closely with program managers, engineers, field teams, and finance/legal teams to ensure payment strategies align with on-the-ground realities and compliance frameworks.
• Ensure excellent handoff of provider execution, oversight and compliance to implementation teams.
• Support crisis response deployments with technical insight and problem-solving on-the-fly to ensure people get paid.

Performance and Reliability Management:

• Define and monitor key metrics (e.g., transaction success rates, payment speeds, reconciliation gaps).
• Coordinate root cause analyses and mitigation planning for issues affecting reliability, latency, or compliance, and feed this into the product and FSP strategy

Drive Efficiency and Creativity:

• Leverage your creativity to solve the unique challenges of delivering money in unpredictable, unstable, or disconnected environments.
• Continuously refine internal payment playbooks and propose systemic improvements to speed, reliability, and recipient experience.

What you’ll bring:

• Exceptional alignment with GiveDirectly Values and active demonstration of our core competencies: emotional intelligence, problem solving, project management, follow-through, and fostering inclusivity. We welcome and strongly encourage applications from candidates who have personal or professional experience in the low-income and/or historically marginalized communities that we serve.
• 5+ years of experience working with international digital payment systems, financial technology platforms, and/or crypto/blockchain-enabled services.
• Demonstrated understanding of global remittance infrastructures, mobile money networks, cross-border compliance issues, and KYC/AML processes.
• Hands-on experience evaluating and/or implementing stablecoin or cryptocurrency payment solutions in low-infrastructure environments.
• Experience in a high ambiguity, low-structure environment — you create clarity, not wait for it
• Ability to collaborate inclusively with stakeholders across varied social, national, and cultural backgrounds, including communicating technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Analytical problem solver: looks at problems with analytical and iterative mindset, with strong framework for prioritization
• Intermediate to advanced data manipulation and analysis skills to derive insights from payment data.
• Technical fluency with payments APIs and technical documentation, including data security standards and the ability to identify areas of concern or strength.
• Language Requirement: English fluency