You won't get a pre-defined backlog. You won't get heavy direction on what to build. You'll operate with real autonomy. You'll dig into data, sit with clients and payroll operators, validate assumptions, think in systems, and come back with a clear point of view. Then you'll drive it.

This is a high-ownership role in a high-pace environment—and one of the highest-leverage roles in Payroll. What you ship is felt by every client, every cycle.

What you'll do

• Own the vision, strategy, and metrics for your part of the payroll experience. Two engineering squads, one problem space, a mandate to have a point of view about where it goes. You'll set the direction, defend it when people push back, and iterate based on what you learn.
• Challenge how payroll is currently done. Your starting assumption: most of the manual work, double-checking, and dependency on payroll expertise is removable. You'll interrogate the existing flow rather than optimize it. Ask what the client is actually trying to achieve and what the shortest path to correct payroll looks like if we designed it today. Your primary customer is a client payroll admin—someone with deep payroll knowledge or almost none. The experience has to work for both: expert controls where they're wanted, confident defaults and clear guidance where they're not. Flexibility without complexity is the hard part.
• Build global frameworks that enable local experiences. Payroll is local by nature and global by ambition. You'll push for frameworks and abstractions that let country-specific requirements be delivered as configuration rather than bespoke builds—so our experience can scale globally.
• Own the metrics that matter. Define what good looks like: touchless payroll rate, accuracy and correction volume, time to submit, self-serve coverage by country, filing success rate, support contact per payroll run. Build the dashboards and early-warning systems that surface risk before a cycle breaks. Track them live and close the gaps relentlessly.
• Translate complexity into clean, well-scoped work. You'll sit between clients, payroll operations, compliance, and engineering. Take the complexity and translate it into clean, well-scoped work your squads can execute fast, with a tight feedback loop so you learn quickly when you're wrong.
• Use AI actively in your day-to-day. Not as a nice-to-have. As your default. Research, synthesis, data analysis, decision documents, spotting patterns in unstructured client feedback. You'll be fluent in prompt engineering and you'll show it.

What we're looking for

Must-have

• 6+ years of product management experience—at least one year at Staff PM level or equivalent senior IC role. You've owned a significant problem space end-to-end, shipped under pressure, and made calls with incomplete information and learned from them.
• Builder mindset, not project manager. (Non-negotiable.) You take a messy, loosely-defined problem space and solve it. You're comfortable without a roadmap. You ask "Why?" and "What are we really trying to achieve?" and come back with a crisp point of view. You thrive on autonomy. You dig to understand what matters. You're impatient with ambiguity and you have a bias toward clarity.
• Fast-iterative mentality. You've operated in fast-scaling environments where you've seen the cost of slow decisions and the leverage of fast feedback loops. You ship, measure, learn, adjust. You're comfortable with 80% certainty and a strong conviction. You iterate based on data, not consensus.
• Systems thinker. You see how teams, tools, and processes connect. You find leverage points others miss. You think about unintended consequences. You optimize for the whole system, not the piece in front of you. When you're looking at a submission flow, you see how it connects to accuracy downstream, support load, compliance exposure, and engineering velocity.
• Comfortable with high-stakes, detail-heavy domains. Payroll is unforgiving: errors are visible, expensive, and sometimes legal. You're close to the work, you hold detail without drowning in it, and you move fast without losing quality.
• Execution-led. You drive delivery. You're impatient with fluff. You communicate with clarity and conciseness—you get to the point fast.
• Data fluent and self-sufficient. You're comfortable with SQL, data platforms, and spreadsheets. You pull your own analysis. You don't wait for someone else to tell you what the data says. You build your own views. Numbers don't faze you.
• AI native. You use AI tools in your day-to-day work. You can show concrete examples of how you use it, not just describe it conceptually. You're curious about new tools and you experiment with them.

Nice-to-have

• Experience in payroll, fintech, accounting, tax, or another domain where correctness is a hard requirement and the cost of being wrong is immediate.
• Experience building products that operate across multiple jurisdictions or regulatory regimes, where the product has to stay coherent while the rules differ everywhere.
• Experience taking an expert-only workflow and making it usable by non-experts through self-serve.
• Experience scaling a product or business through hypergrowth—where you've felt scaling pain and had to rethink architectures, processes, and teams.

About The Culture, And What This Role Demands

This is a high-ownership, high-autonomy role in a team that moves at pace. Before you apply, make sure you recognize yourself in this:

• You self-direct and own your vertical like a founder. There's no roadmap handed to you. You dig, validate, think, and decide. You come back with a clear point of view. You're the CEO of your area.
• You move fast with conviction. You're comfortable making calls with incomplete information. You iterate based on data, not consensus. You're impatient with process. You