Lead Product Manager, Payments

CLEAR - Corporate•New York, NY

9d•$215,000 - $250,000•Onsite

About The Position

CLEAR is building THE secure identity company of the future. Our mission is to make experiences safer and easier—physically and digitally. With more than 38 million Members and a growing network of partners across the world, CLEAR's secure identity platform is transforming the way people live, work, and travel. Whether it’s at the airport, stadium, or throughout your everyday life, CLEAR unlocks the magic of frictionless experiences. As a Lead Product Manager for Payments, you’ll own the vision, strategy, and execution of CLEAR’s payment capabilities across our product suite. You will enable secure, seamless, and scalable transactions that power our members’ experiences and our business growth. Your work will sit at the center of how CLEAR builds trust, reduces friction, and expands the value we deliver to members and partners.

Requirements

9+ years of product management experience, ideally owning payments, fintech, transaction systems, or high-integrity platform components.
Demonstrated experience evaluating and integrating with multiple PSPs, fraud vendors, billing systems, tax engines, and accounting tools.
Proven ability to optimize payment routing using data-driven logic across processors, regions, and payment types.
Deep understanding of payment processing, authorization flows, payment gateways, subscription billing, risk/fraud concepts, and reconciliation.
Experience delivering user-facing and partner-facing features tied to revenue, trust, or financial accuracy.
Skilled at partnering with Engineering, Finance, Risk, Security, and Operations to ship reliable, compliant, and scalable payment capabilities.
Comfortable navigating complex regulatory environments and translating compliance into intuitive user experiences and platform-level controls.
Strong cross-functional leadership and ability to drive progress through ambiguity from vision to detailed execution.
Ability to think beyond the immediate roadmap and articulate a multi-year payments vision aligned with CLEAR’s broader platform strategy.
Excellent communication skills, able to explain technical or regulatory payment concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Customer-obsessed with a passion for reducing friction, improving trust, and driving business value through payments excellence.

Responsibilities

Define and own the product strategy and roadmap for CLEAR’s payments platform spanning payment acceptance, billing, refunds, risk & fraud mitigation, reconciliation, compliance, and platform reliability.
Lead the development and enhancement of core payment systems in partnership with Engineering, Finance, Security, and Operations to ensure accuracy, robustness, and seamless user experiences.
Design and deliver scalable, compliant payment flows that support CLEAR’s consumer subscriptions, partner programs, and new business lines.
Improve payment success rates, reduce risk, and optimize costs through experimentation, vendor selection, routing logic, and friction-reducing UX.
Translate regulatory, compliance, and tax requirements (e.g., PCI, PSD2/SCA, chargeback rules) into product features and platform safeguards.
Define and evolve reporting and reconciliation capabilities to ensure financial accuracy, reduce operational burden, and enable real-time visibility into payment health.
Partner cross-functionally with Engineering, Finance, Risk, Customer Experience, GTM, and Legal to deliver high-quality, compliant, and resilient payment solutions.
Establish clear KPIs and success metrics such as authorization rate, fraud rate, cost of payments, and payment-related NPS and use them to inform prioritization, iteration, and impact storytelling.
Develop a framework for scaling payment operations, ensuring tools, dashboards, and workflows exist for finance, customer experience, and risk teams to operate efficiently.
Develop a holistic view of the payment funnel—from attempted payment through settlement—and use cohort analysis, A/B testing, and segmentation to drive improvements.