Director of Product Management (Payments)

• Guild is hiring a Director of Product, Payments, to lead the team building how money moves across Guild
• You’ll own the strategy for Guild’s payment network - the infrastructure that funds education between employers, Guild, and learning providers - and lead a team of product managers expanding our offering to a flexible menu of payment modalities that expands Guild’s ability to meet discrete finance needs in the context of a benefit
• This is a leadership role with a broad remit: defining payment network strategy, leading a world-class team, and building the core of a product that impacts millions of learners in the US
• To be eligible, you must have established experience building payments products before at a payments company, a fintech, or a platform that embedded card issuing and money movement into its product
• The ideal candidate has done that work on a global scale
• You bring a sharp point of view on payments economics, a willingness to challenge the status quo, and the commercial and financial fluency to be a true partner to Finance, Commercial, and the leadership team
• If that sounds like you, read on!
• Payment Network Strategy & Ownership: Own the multi-year strategy for Guild’s payment network — how users on all three sides of the marketplace fund education through Guild, spanning virtual cards, reimbursement, and other transaction modalities. Set the vision, make the calls on sequencing and investment, and be accountable for the outcomes
• Team Leadership: Lead, coach, and grow a team of product managers across payment modalities and platform capabilities. Set the bar for product craft, build a strong operating rhythm, and develop PMs into leaders
• Zero-to-One and Scale: Guide the team from concept through vendor selection, pilot, and scale - shipping quickly, learning, and iterating - while knowing when to step in on high-stakes decisions and when to let the team run
• AI-Native Product Development: Set the expectation that your team builds and operates with AI where appropriate, and identify where AI materially improves the product itself, and at what level
• Vendor & Network Partnerships: Help facilitate Guild’s relationships with processors, card networks, and money movement partners. Assist commercial negotiations on economics, SLAs, and roadmap alignment, and manage the partner portfolio over time
• Payments Economics & Pricing: Partner with stakeholders on pricing, packaging, and business cases; challenge assumptions and bring an informed outside perspective to Guild’s monetization strategy
• Cross-Functional Leadership: Represent payments strategy in executive and leadership-level conversations. Align Engineering, Finance, Legal, Commercial, and Operations around a shared roadmap, and resolve trade-offs across them
• Compliance, Risk & Program Governance: Partner with Legal, Compliance, and Finance to set the governance framework for card issuing and money movement - spend controls, reconciliation, settlement, fraud prevention, and program oversight - and make sure the team builds to it
• Funding Service Optimization: Set and drive the strategy for Guild’s funding service, improving speed, reliability, working capital efficiency, and cost per transaction

Benefits

• Well-rounded wellness benefits including free and low cost mental health resources and financial wellbeing support services
• Education benefits and tuition assistance to help your future development and growth
• Equity stake in the company providing ownership and a path to future earnings (when we succeed, we all benefit)
• free one-on-one coaching with a certified financial planner, a platform with budgeting tools, investment and equity management center and many more financial resources through Origin (we believe financial literacy not only supports you personally, but also has a lasting impact in creating positive generational wealth practices)
• Employee Assistance Fund for unforeseen crises, disasters, and/or personal hardships and you need a little extra financial support (funded by the company and fellow Guilders to create a community of support)
• legal support and resources to navigate complicated situations like estate planning name changes, immigration, and more
• 401(k) plan with a range of diverse investment options and personalized retirement advice
• Multiple paths to meet educational and professional goals
• Fertility benefits built into all of our medical plans
• A $10,000 family planning fund to take care of costs that aren’t covered by the medical plans like adoption, surrogacy, and egg freezing expenses
• 12-20 weeks of paid leave and a ramp-up program for Guilders to ease back into work after an extended time away
• An additional 3 weeks of paid leave if you are going through the adoption, surrogacy, or foster process to use prior to your child’s arrival/placement to prepare and attend necessary meeting
• Inclusive guidance and support as you go through your family planning journey through Cleo
• Our on-site childcare center, The Beehive, offering care for children 3 months-6 years of age for employees and their friends and family members located in Colorado
• Personalized 1:1 support for anyone on the parenthood journey with access to a network of clinicians, experts, and specialists through Cleo
• 80 hours of low cost ($2/hr) emergency backup care for times employees unexpectedly find themselves without primary care for the ones they are responsible for
• Dedicated support in finding background-checked care providers to assist with child care, elder care, and chronic care needs through Helpr
• The ability to bring an actively nursing child and companion on work related trips
• Inclusive, affordable medical and behavioral healthcare when you need it
• Open PTO is available so Guilders can rest, recharge, and bring their best selves to work
• 10 Holidays including a collective week off over the 4th of July plus 5 floating holidays for cultural and religious events you celebrate
• Our leave policies are there to support employees and offer 12 weeks of fully paid medical, non-birthing parent, and caregiving leave as of day one of employment while birthing parents receive 18-20 weeks of fully paid leave
• Once Guilders reach 4.5 years of service, they are eligible for a 5-week fully paid sabbatical leave
• Up to 10 days of bereavement leave
• Up to 10 days of jury duty
• 8 sick days

• Leadership Presence: Equally comfortable presenting strategy to the executive team, digging into transaction-level data with your PMs, and sitting with a customer to understand why a payment flow fails them
• Technical Fluency: Able to go deep with engineers on API design, integration architecture, and build-vs-buy trade-offs; engineering leaders trust your judgment and instincts
• Financial Fluency: Comfort building and defending financial models; able to work as a peer with Finance on unit economics, pricing, and working capital, and to challenge the status quo when the numbers say so
• People Leadership: 5+ years managing product managers, with a track record of developing PMs, running a healthy team, and raising the quality bar
• Payments Domain Depth: Fluency in the mechanics of card issuing and money movement, and the vendor ecosystem behind them. Experience with cross-border payments is a plus
• Experience: 10+ years of product management experience, including significant time building payments products - card issuing, virtual cards, money movement, or B2B payment flows - at a fintech or payments company or in an embedded payments role at a platform company. Bonus if this experience has been global
• Strategic Track Record: Demonstrated success setting and executing a multi-year payments strategy, including business case building, and taking products from zero to launch and scaling through ambiguity
• AI Fluency: You use AI tools daily in your own work and have a point of view on where they change how product teams operate. You can separate the real opportunities in payments (risk, reconciliation, support, emerging agentic payment flows) from the hype, and you hold your team to a high bar for using it well
• Deal-Making: Experience facilitating third-party vendor and network partnerships end to end - sourcing, negotiating, and managing them - and partnering with commercial and legal teams on terms and economics