Senior Product Manager, Compliance

Portless

3d•Remote

About The Position

Portless is changing the face of global e-commerce. By decoupling brands from traditional, expensive domestic warehousing, we let e-commerce companies ship directly from manufacturing hubs to global consumers in as little as three to five days. We move packages to 75+ countries for hundreds of DTC brands, with 2.5 million+ cross-border packages shipped, 99.8% pick-and-pack accuracy, and 98% on-time delivery. We're a small, remote-first team, and the work you do here shows up in a merchant's business within weeks. Compliance has no clear product direction. We work with multiple compliance partners and we've built real integration infrastructure to support them. What we haven't decided is what Portless itself offers as a compliance product, and that decision is now blocking several others. Build, buy, or partner is an open question with real money behind it. Some of this capability is genuinely commoditized and should be bought. Some of it is close enough to our core that owning it is a differentiator. Nobody has done the work to draw that line and defend it. The data problem is upstream of everything. Compliance decisions depend on product data that originates in merchant catalogs of wildly varying quality, then flows through several systems before it reaches a customs declaration. Every downstream problem traces back to where that data came from and whether anyone validated it. We're operating at a scale where that's now hundreds of thousands of SKUs. The manual work is real and it's growing. Audits, escalations, chasing merchants for missing data, gating SKUs that aren't ready. Our ops and CS teams absorb this today. Product should be removing it, not watching it scale. Merchants can't see any of it. They don't know their compliance exposure, they can't self-serve a fix, and we can't show them the value we're providing. That's a product gap and a commercial one.

Requirements

5+ years in product management with real ownership of a complex, data-heavy domain.
Ability to think in systems and data flow, mapping information origins, degradation, and leverage points.
Proficiency in analyzing and using data to validate claims.
Experience making build-versus-buy decisions and managing their consequences.
Strong written communication skills for strategy, decision documents, and specifications.
Ability to hold a position under pressure and adapt based on evidence.
Experience in cross-border commerce, logistics, fulfillment, or supply chain, as a product manager or in a closely adjacent role.
Experience dealing with compliance at a strategic level, understanding classification, declared value, duties, and destination requirements.
Fluency in compliance concepts sufficient to be credible with partners, carriers, and internal experts, with the judgment to know when to involve deeper expertise.
Ability to work closely with merchants, operations, and customer service teams.
Focus on identifying systemic solutions to problems.
Adherence to a single, canonical roadmap.

Nice To Haves

Not a trade counsel role.
Not a compliance analyst role.
Not a single-feature role; scope is the whole flow.

Responsibilities

Own the end-to-end compliance flow, from merchant catalog to cleared shipment: where the data originates, how it's validated, where it's enriched, what's stored, what gets declared, and what happens when something is missing or wrong.
Define the compliance strategy, including what Portless owns, what it buys, and what it partners for.
Improve data quality as a product outcome, focusing on classification coverage and accuracy, declared values, country of origin, and related metrics.
Develop mechanisms for prevention over cleanup, such as validation at intake, gating, and escalation processes.
Build the merchant-facing product for compliance, enabling merchants to understand their exposure and demonstrating the value Portless provides.
Manage partner strategy and integration, evaluating market offerings and deciding on partnerships.