Lead Product Manager - Payments Data Platform & Governance

PayPal•San Jose, CA

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

PayPal is committed to building and scaling the next generation of payment integration technologies for merchants, consumers and developers globally. This team is part of the CTO’s organization and designing future-forward technologies and experiences to enable global commerce. Platform technologies built by this team will be instrumental in helping drive PayPal’s global reach through best-in-class technology solutions. You will own the strategy and execution of the data platform and data governance ecosystem of global wallet products, ensuring secure, compliant, and high quality data for payments, compliance, and risk platforms. This role sits at the intersection of product, data, and financial regulation and is accountable for enabling safe innovation in a highly regulated environment.

Requirements

8+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor’s degree OR Any equivalent combination of education and experience.
12+ years of product management experience, with substantial time building data platforms, data infrastructure, or data governance in financial services or fintech.
Deep understanding of fintech business models (payments, banking, cards, wallets) and how data flows through ledgers, risk engines, and customer‑facing products.
Strong knowledge of modern data architectures (streaming with Kafka/Kinesis, lakehouse/warehouses, ELT/ETL, semantic layers) and how to design them for financial data integrity and reconciliation.
Hands‑on familiarity with data governance practices and tools: catalog and lineage, sensitive data discovery, RBAC/ABAC, data quality frameworks, policy and consent management, and audit reporting.
Proven experience embedding KYC/AML, privacy, and financial‑regulatory requirements into product roadmaps, and partnering effectively with Compliance, Legal, and Risk.
Excellent communication and storytelling skills, able to explain complex data and regulatory constraints to executives and non‑technical stakeholders.
Operate as the accountable owner for data platform and governance across a major fintech product portfolio or business line, with direct impact on regulatory posture and revenue growth.
Anticipate regulatory and market changes, proactively evolve the platform and governance capabilities, and guide other product leaders on compliant innovation.
BS/BA in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or related field; advanced degree or equivalent industry experience in fintech or financial services preferred.

Nice To Haves

Product leader for AI, data platforms, and agentic systems, specializing in MCP-based tool integration and autonomous data agents.

Responsibilities

Drives product strategy with cross-functional stakeholders consistent with the shared vision for the product or enabling platform.
Plans and implements the architectural roadmap that balances innovative design and technical implementation, while balancing regulatory requirements, time-to-market, meeting customer needs and product profitability.
Assesses the customer experience and customer needs in product requirements and decision making.
Sets up data gathering mechanisms relative to the metrics that inform the success of products including usability studies, research and market analysis.
Leads workstreams to include analytics, customer discovery, market research and competitive analysis to drive data-driven decision-making.
Oversees product profitability measures, including budget.
Plans operational mechanisms that drive execution and accountability including Product Reviews, Operating Reviews, and Business Reviews.
Interfaces with product and technology leadership as needed.
Partners with content strategists, data scientists, product designers and user experience researchers.
Maximizes efficiency in a constantly evolving environment where the process is fluid and creative solutions are the standard.
Define a multi‑year product strategy for the enterprise data platform and governance services that power core use cases (KYC, AML, risk, fraud, ledgers, payments, regulations).
Own the roadmap for foundational data capabilities: streaming and batch pipelines for financial events, data lake/warehouse and other data services, data catalog and lineage, access management, quality and observability, policy and consent management.
Embed regulatory and compliance needs (KYC, AML, sanctions, GDPR/CCPA, SOX, PCI‑DSS, data residency) into platform and governance design as first‑class product requirements.
Partner with Risk, Compliance, Legal, InfoSec, and Privacy to translate policies into scalable controls (classification, retention, RBAC/ABAC, audit trails, segregation of duties) that are enforced via platform services rather than one‑off implementations.
Ensure data produced by product and systems (accounts, balances, transactions, underwriting decisions) is accurate, reconciled, well‑modeled, and discoverable for analytics, ML, and regulatory reporting.
Drive adoption of platform and governance capabilities across payments, lending, fraud, growth, and operations teams, with clear documentation, onboarding paths, and SLAs tailored to financial workloads (latency, durability, correctness).
Define and track KPIs such as data incident rate, regulatory findings tied to data, time‑to‑ship compliant features, data quality scores on critical assets, and platform NPS among internal customers.
Lead build‑vs‑buy decisions for fintech‑specific tooling (transaction monitoring, customer 360, consent and preference management, catalog/lineage, data quality and observability) and manage vendor relationships where needed.
Represent the data platform and governance domain in risk committees, audits, regulator interactions, and board‑level discussions as required.
Mentor senior PMs and influence a distributed team of data and platform leaders to ensure coherence across markets, products, and regulatory regimes.
Product leader for AI, data platforms, and agentic systems, specializing in MCP-based tool integration and autonomous data agents.
Collaborate with data, security, and platform teams to ensure agentic data workflows comply with governance, privacy, and regulatory requirements.