Product Manager, Payments

Stash

2d • Remote

About The Position

Stash is the direct-to-consumer commerce platform for game studios. We build the webshops, checkout experiences, and merchant-of-record infrastructure that let games sell directly to players — cutting the 30% app store tax and increasing LTV. Studios like SuperPlay, Rovio, Jagex, EA, and WB Games run their direct-to-player commerce on Stash, and we already process hundreds of millions of dollars a year in D2C revenue. We're scaling fast toward a 5x volume target in 2026, and we're building out the product team to match.

As our first dedicated Payments PM, you'll own payments end to end across every Stash surface — Stash Pay, Webshop, and beyond. That means authorization/approval rate optimization, multiprocessor and acquirer routing (including failover and cascading across PSPs), retry and recovery logic for failed or declined transactions, fraud-vs-conversion tradeoffs, and Merchant-of-Record obligations (tax compliance, disputes/chargebacks, regional payment compliance).

This is not a checkout-UX role — checkout UX, conversion into checkout, and partner integration experience are owned by our Checkout PM. You'll touch the checkout surface only where a payments decision surfaces there (e.g., a retry or alternate-method prompt after a decline), not to redesign the buying flow itself. You're tied to the product, not to individual partners: your job is to turn partner-specific payment failures into systemic routing, retry, and fraud improvements. Authorization/approval rate and payment success rate are the north star metrics of this role.

We're aiming for a payments engine that's best-in-class for approval rates, resilience, and cost — on par with the bar set by Stripe Payments, Adyen, and orchestration platforms like Primer and Spreedly.

This is a high-agency, build-it-from-scratch role. There's no existing playbook — you'll create one, and you'll be the final call on payments decisions.

Requirements

• Background at a tech/SaaS or payments/fintech company, with direct, hands-on ownership of a payments/processing surface
• Direct, hands-on experience collaborating with engineering teams
• Comfortable overlap West Coast hours given where our product and payments strategy is concentrated
• High agency and ownership — you're comfortable being the first dedicated payments PM, building structure from scratch, and being the final call on payments decisions
• An MVP, incremental-build mindset — you scope down, ship iteratively, and push back on scope creep
• Tight project management execution — you run a disciplined roadmap and hold timelines and commitments without slippage
• Payments/processing domain expertise — solid working knowledge of multiprocessor routing and a feel for where and why transactions fail
• Data and experimentation rigor — you instrument payment funnels, run holdback/A-B tests on routing and retry logic, and let approval-rate data (not opinion) drive prioritization
• A generalization instinct — you turn partner-specific payment failures into systemic product fixes
• Clear communication — specs, roadmap updates that land with engineering, sales, and leadership

Responsibilities

• Act as the translation layer between payments operations, compliance, and the engineering team — turning operational needs and business risk into clear, prioritized requirements engineers can build against
• Own and maintain the company-wide payments roadmap: translate business priorities into an effort-estimated, impact-sized backlog, and be the single accountable owner of sprint planning and prioritization for the payments eng team
• Define and own authorization/approval rate, payment success rate, false decline rate, and cost-per-transaction as core business KPIs; turn the gap against industry benchmarks (healthy e-commerce card-not-present authorization rates typically run 85–95%, with 90%+ considered well-optimized) into a prioritized set of requirements for engineering
• Build the business case and scoped requirements for multiprocessor/acquirer routing and failover, so engineering can build smart routing that keeps a single processor outage or high-decline processor from materially denting revenue
• Prioritize and scope retry and recovery logic improvements with engineering, weighing recovered revenue against fraud exposure
• Own the fraud-vs-conversion tradeoff as a business decision: set the target for reducing false declines and the acceptable chargeback/dispute threshold, then translate that into prioritized engineering work
• Translate Merchant-of-Record obligations (tax compliance, disputes/chargebacks, regional payment compliance) into product requirements the engineering team can plan and ship against
• In your first 90 days: learn our PSP/acquirer integrations, routing logic, retry/recovery, fraud rules, and MoR/tax stack well enough to translate operational needs into scoped, prioritized engineering requirements — not to become a payments engineer yourself; establish baseline metrics and identify the top 3 sources of failed or declined transactions; take over sprint planning for the payments eng team; and ship one meaningful, metrics-backed improvement to approval rate or payment success rate

Benefits

• Work on products used by some of the world's leading game studios
• Own a core product area with significant autonomy and impact
• Help shape the future of direct-to-consumer commerce in gaming
• Join a lean, ambitious, and highly collaborative team building products at scale

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed