Principal Product Manager - Event & Messaging

Early Warning® • Scottsdale, AZ

2d • Hybrid

About The Position

At Early Warning, we’ve powered and protected the U.S. financial system for over thirty years with cutting-edge solutions like Zelle®, Paze℠, and so much more. As a trusted name in payments, we partner with thousands of institutions to increase access to financial services and protect transactions for hundreds of millions of consumers and small businesses. Positions located in Scottsdale, San Francisco, Chicago, or New York follow a hybrid work model to allow for a more collaborative working environment. Candidates responding to this posting must independently possess the eligibility to work in the United States, for any employer, at the date of hire. This position is ineligible for employment Visa sponsorship. Overall Purpose The Principal Product Manager is a leader responsible the development and management of a group of products aligned with a customer segment and/or product solution. The role will build, align, and motivate a cross functional team to develop a common understanding of the customer’s pain points and the passion to solve issues and develop innovative solutions that delight customers. Essential Functions Leadership: Builds internal and external coalitions and alignment on product strategy and execution. Influences cross functional teams, executives and customer leadership with strong vision, strategy, and product execution. Customer Passion and Advocacy: Proactively assesses customer needs across the portfolio of products to maximize customer satisfaction. Routinely leverages feedback into insights; and builds products and services that delight and inspire. Drive Outcomes: Working closely across marketing, sales, analytics, design and development partners, drive strong go to market strategies to attain product revenue and client adoption targets. Owns internal financial targets and customer net promoter and satisfaction goals. Commitment to Risk Management: Oversees the integration of strong risk and security controls. Ensures compliance to laws and regulations. Technical Understanding: Able and adept at working directly with the technologists to deliver. Clearly defines requirements, grooms user stories, motivates technical teams and partners with technology closely. Support the company’s commitment to risk management and protecting the integrity and confidentiality of systems and data. Zelle® Event & Messaging Platform Product Management Focus: In this technical product management role, the Principal Product Manager will be responsible for leading the core event data domain and messaging framework for the Zelle® Platform. The Principal Product Manager must have the product management skillset and technical acumen necessary to become the subject matter expert in Zelle® Platform technology. The ideal candidate will be comfortable engaging deeply with solutions architects and software engineers as well as collaborating with business, technical and operational stakeholders both internally and at Zelle® financial institution and reseller customers. The Principal Product Manager will develop and execute a strategy to drive resilient, performant and scalable Zelle® event architecture—mitigating risk and improving service quality to support future growth. Must be an expert at busting down silos to fully assess customer impact, weigh tradeoffs, finalize product requirements and align the product roadmap with other Zelle platform and growth teams.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree
• 12 or more years of related work experience
• Demonstrated experience in design thinking and agile development process and methodology
• Demonstrated cross functional collaboration experience.
• Proven experience in and passion for building and delivering great products.
• Demonstrated experience in setting a product strategy, roadmap and in meeting product revenue targets.
• Demonstrated experience driving alignment at the executive and client leadership level
• Excellent listening and execution skills
• Background and drug screen

Nice To Haves

• Master’s degree
• Certifications in design thinking and/or agile.
• 3+ years of experience with at scale payment processing, data platforms, or event processing systems used by financial institutions or enterprise customers.
• Deep understanding of event-driven architecture patterns (event sourcing, pub/sub, CQRS) and modern messaging infrastructure (Kafka, Pulsar, RabbitMQ, or equivalent), with ability to engage credibly with engineering to influence design-level decisions.
• Demonstrated experience owning high-throughput, low-latency platform capabilities in production environments, processing millions of transactions per day, with direct accountability for availability and performance SLAs.
• Track record of defining and shipping developer-facing platform products—APIs, Webhooks, and SDKs—with a strong instinct for internal and external developer experience.
• Fluency in payments network concepts including authorization, clearing and settlement, message formatting standards and operational payment processing rails (card, ACH, RTP, wire, stablecoin & blockchain technology, etc.).
• Experience navigating platform governance in regulated environments, including schema versioning, event schema registries, audit requirements, and data residency constraints.
• Experience systems thinking, with the ability to consider end-to-end blast radius reduction when changing shared platform components.
• Proven ability to define and drive a product roadmap that delivers platform resiliency and scalability at increasing scale, while keeping technical debt to a minimum.
• Experience defining and tracking platform-level success metrics and translating them into actionable product priorities.
• Experience with Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), microservices and large platform migrations from on-premises to cloud services environments a plus.
• Experience identifying and productizing AI/ML applications within platform infrastructure—such as anomaly detection on event streams, intelligent routing or retry logic, and predictive alerting—with the ability to partner with data science and ML engineering teams to define feature requirements, evaluate model efficacy, and govern AI-driven decisioning within a regulated environment a plus.

Responsibilities

• Builds internal and external coalitions and alignment on product strategy and execution.
• Influences cross functional teams, executives and customer leadership with strong vision, strategy, and product execution.
• Proactively assesses customer needs across the portfolio of products to maximize customer satisfaction.
• Routinely leverages feedback into insights; and builds products and services that delight and inspire.
• Working closely across marketing, sales, analytics, design and development partners, drive strong go to market strategies to attain product revenue and client adoption targets.
• Owns internal financial targets and customer net promoter and satisfaction goals.
• Oversees the integration of strong risk and security controls.
• Ensures compliance to laws and regulations.
• Able and adept at working directly with the technologists to deliver.
• Clearly defines requirements, grooms user stories, motivates technical teams and partners with technology closely.
• Support the company’s commitment to risk management and protecting the integrity and confidentiality of systems and data.
• Responsible for leading the core event data domain and messaging framework for the Zelle® Platform.
• Develop and execute a strategy to drive resilient, performant and scalable Zelle® event architecture—mitigating risk and improving service quality to support future growth.
• Bust down silos to fully assess customer impact, weigh tradeoffs, finalize product requirements and align the product roadmap with other Zelle platform and growth teams.

Benefits

• Competitive medical (PPO/HDHP), dental, and vision plans as well as company contributions to your Health Savings Account (HSA) or pre-tax savings through flexible spending accounts (FSA) for commuting, health & dependent care expenses.
• 401(k) Retirement Plan – Featuring a 100% Company Safe Harbor Match on your first 6% deferral immediately upon eligibility.
• Flexible Time Off for Exempt (salaried) employees, as well as generous PTO for Non-Exempt (hourly) employees, plus 11 paid company holidays and a paid volunteer day.
• 12 weeks of Paid Parental Leave
• Maven Family Planning – provides support through your Parenting journey including egg freezing, fertility, adoption, surrogacy, pregnancy, postpartum, early pediatrics, and returning to work.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal