Product Director

Location: Remote - United States only (must reside in the U.S.) Eligibility: Must be authorized to work in the United States Team: Product Reports to: CTO (you'll work directly with the CTO) Direct reports: Multiple engineering leads, each owning a product area

Rise is a global payments and payroll platform built for the way modern teams actually work - across borders, currencies, and rails. We make it easy for companies to pay full-time employees, contractors, and freelancers anywhere in the world, in either fiat or digital assets, with the compliance, tax, and identity infrastructure handled underneath.

Two things make that possible: ramps - how money gets into and out of Rise, across banking rails, card networks, and stablecoins - and identity - how a customer proves who they are, once and then never has to do it again. This role owns both.

We're a lean, high-trust, high-ownership team. We hold a high bar for correctness, security, and accountability - the work is meaningful precisely because the stakes are real. We value:

• Ownership over hand-offs. You'll own these product lines end to end and have the autonomy that comes with that.

• Depth over decks. We expect product leaders to understand the rails, the ledger, and the failure modes - not just the roadmap.

• Directness and low ego. We give and receive candid feedback, write things down, and prefer clarity over politics.

Working directly with the CTO, you'll own product for Rise's ramps and identity surfaces - the two systems every customer touches first and trusts most. This is a hands-on, technical product role, not a coordination seat: you'll set direction, sit in the architecture discussions, negotiate with providers, dig into the funnel data yourself, and be accountable for the outcomes. Multiple engineering leads report to you, each owning a product area - so you're accountable for delivery, not just for the plan.

Ramps: money in and money out

• Own the end-to-end product for funding and payout - ACH, wires, SEPA, local rails in the markets we serve, and stablecoin and crypto on/off-ramps.

• Own the customer experience of moving money: time to first successful deposit, payout success rate, settlement times, and the clarity of every state in between (pending, held, returned, failed).

• Drive rail and provider strategy: evaluate, select, and negotiate with banking partners, PSPs, and on/off-ramp providers, and own the business case for each - coverage, cost per transaction, FX spread, settlement speed, and reliability.

• Lead new market and new currency expansion - which corridors we open next, what rails they require, and what it takes to launch them.

• Own the economics: transaction cost, FX, fees, and margin on money movement, with a clear view of unit economics per corridor and per rail.

• Reduce failure and friction - returned payments, rejected transfers, mismatched beneficiary details, reconciliation breaks - and turn recurring support load into product fixes.

• Set direction on the hard parts underneath the surface: how balances stay correct, how a duplicate or timed-out payment is handled, how we reconcile against providers, and what happens when one fails. You don't need to build these - you do need to reason about them and decide what gets prioritized.

• Define and own provider redundancy: what happens when a rail or provider goes down, and how quickly we route around it.

Identity: turning verification into product

• Own what we build on top of verified identity. Our compliance team owns collecting and adjudicating KYC and KYB; you own what that verified identity becomes for the customer - onboarding that pre-fills itself for anyone we already know, credentials a customer can present to a partner instead of starting a new application, counterparties who can recognize each other without exchanging documents, and verified status that unlocks higher limits and new products automatically.

• Rebuild onboarding around what we already know. Verification is where we lose people - every step a returning or already-verified customer has to repeat is a step you should be deleting. You own pass rates and time-to-verified.

• Build the attestation layer as a real product: what Rise vouches for, how a customer sees and controls it, how it stays current, and what happens when it expires or is withdrawn.

• Build federation - the surface that lets a customer take their Rise-verified status to a partner, protocol, or counterparty, and lets us accept identity that was established somewhere else. This is greenfield and it's yours to define.

• Ship business identity as more than a form: an org, its owners, its signers, and its counterparties, modeled once so that adding a new entity, a new payer, or a new market doesn't mean starting from zero.

• Turn verified identity into leverage elsewhere in Rise - limits that lift themselves, products that unlock without an application, payouts that clear faster because we already know who's on both ends.

• Give customers something to look at: clear status, clear reasons, and a path forward when something is pending or fails. Trust is a UX problem as much as a controls problem.

Product leadership

• Lead a group of engineering leads, each accountable for a product area. You set the priorities, hold the bar on quality and pace, keep the areas coherent with each other, and own what ships and when.

• Grow those leads: give them room to own their product, back their judgment, and be the person who makes their work land with the rest of the company.

• Own the roadmap across both areas: strategy, prioritization, sequencing, and the trade-offs, with the CTO as your closest partner.

• Write clear, specs and decision records that engineers can build from.

• Work directly with compliance, finance, operations, support, and engineering - these products sit at the intersection of all of them.

• Be the internal and external voice for these products: partner conversations, provider reviews, customer escalations, and enterprise diligence.

Required

• Authorized to work in the United States and U.S.-based.

• 8+ years in product management, including senior or leadership scope, with a track record of owning outcomes rather than backlogs.

• High ownership, accountability, and the capacity to execute. Multiple engineering leads will report to you, so you own delivery as well as strategy - the results are yours.

• Experience leading engineers, or leading through engineering leads, and getting products shipped through them.

• Deep understanding of blockchain and crypto payment ecosystem.

• Direct experience with crypto on/off-ramps, and banking integrations.

• Experience with KYC/KYB and identity verification products to help plan Rise's own identity products.

• Comfort working closely with compliance and regulatory stakeholders - you can hold a serious conversation about AML obligations.

• Excellent communicator. You can sell an idea internally and externally, and present the product credibly to customers, partners, and providers - clear in writing, strong in the room, and persuasive without needing a 20-page memo.

• Experience with Ethereum based products like wallets, exchanges, ramps, or tokens.

Nice to have

• Experience launching payment corridors in multiple countries or regions.

• Experience in a regulated, funds-handling environment (MSB, EMI, licensed payments business).

• Data fluency - you write your own queries (SQL) and build your own funnel analysis rather than waiting on someone else.

• AI powered workflow, using AI daily to accomplish your work.

• Fraud and risk product experience.

• Base salary: $190,000–$230,000, commensurate with experience.

• Meaningful equity in a growing company.

• Unlimited PTO and a flexible work schedule - we care about outcomes, not hours.

• 401(k) with a 3% company contribution.

• Fully remote within the United States.

Ramps and identity are the front door to a global payments platform - the parts customers judge us on first and trust us with most. You'll own both, with real scope, real autonomy, and a direct line to the CTO.

The problems are genuinely hard: dozens of rails, dozens of jurisdictions, fiat and stablecoins, and a regulatory floor you can't compromise on. If you want a seat where product judgment translates directly into money moving faster, cheaper, and more reliably for real people, this is it.

Growth: This role is deliberately unbounded. You'll be in the rooms where the real decisions get made - strategy, partnerships, pricing, roadmap, the hard calls - not briefed on them afterward. There's no approval chain to grind through and no committee between you and a decision. If you see something worth doing, you're empowered to go do it, and the only real constraint is your own judgment about what matters most.

That makes this a great fit for someone genuinely ambitious. If you want to own more over time, build a team around you, and take on scope well beyond ramps and identity, this is a place where that happens fast and on merit - we'd rather grow the people already doing the work than hire above them. Come in wanting more than the job description says, and you'll get it.