Senior Product Manager, Payroll

What this job can offer you

This is an exciting time to join Remote as a Senior Product Manager, Payroll, an IC role for someone with genuinely high technical depth — trading management scope for depth. You'll partner with your Engineering Team Lead and Staff Engineers on architecture and technical direction as a peer, not an observer, forming your own technical opinions and prototyping to answer questions rather than scheduling a meeting about them.

Your mission is to own your product area end to end: not just the software, but the full experience customers and internal teams get from it, including the API surface other teams and integrators build on.

What you bring

• Technical Direction: Partner with the Engineering Team Lead and Staff Engineers on architecture, design quality, and technical direction. Form independent, well-reasoned technical opinions and hold your own in design reviews as a peer.
• Build to Learn: Prototype and write code to de-risk ideas, answer open questions, or ship small pieces yourself rather than defaulting to a meeting.
• API & Integration Quality: Own products where APIs are the product surface. Design contracts, guide versioning and backwards compatibility, and own the developer experience for teams and systems integrating with your product.
• Root Cause Problem-Solving: Sit with the specialists and ops teams doing the manual work, observe real workflows, and prioritize based on where the pain actually is. When systems disagree, fix the underlying cause rather than building a better reconciliation report.
• End-to-End Ownership: Own adoption and hypercare, not just delivery — including whether what you shipped is actually being used months later.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with payroll and tax experts on research and requirements, convene across teams, and onboard others into context generously.
• Clear Communication: Document decisions and reasoning in writing (specs, Looms, proposals) so your thinking is inspectable and can be challenged.

Key Responsibilities

• Proficiency in Cursor and/or Claude Code is required. You must be able to autonomously build, debug, and ship functional code/prototypes, not just write specs.
• Experience as product manager in a high-growth company
• Experience working in payroll, HR, benefits, fintech, or similar
• Great judgment making both strategic (what to prioritize) and tactical (feature scope) decisions
• Demonstrable, self-driven results that have moved a product in the right direction
• A strong sense of product design (UX)
• A passion for products that just work, even if the problems they solve are boring and complicated
• Outstanding communication and collaboration skills, including across different departments (e.g. business operations, sales, etc.) to ensure that we’re satisfying critical business requirements
• Business-level proficiency writing and speaking English
• Bonus: experience working remotely