Senior Product Consultant — Platform Blueprint

About us:

We are an AI-native HR platform for cross-border employment in Southeast Asia — from hiring to every local payslip, accessed through conversation rather than dashboards.

We are not a typical pre-product startup. The platform is built on top of two operating businesses: a MOM-licensed recruitment firm and a cross-border EOR and payroll company. Around 300 employees are already managed on our infrastructure, with real clients, real payroll cycles, and real compliance obligations across Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Hong Kong.

That means two things for you. The requirements are not hypothetical — there is an operations team executing them by hand today. And whatever you design will be in production, not in a deck.

What we need solved:

Five domains have to work as one system:

Hiring → Onboarding → Employee wallet

Designing that spine is the job. Everything else is a projection of it.

In scope:

• The employment record data model: entities, fields, relationships, effective dating, and how identity transitions from candidate to employee
• State machines for the core objects — employee lifecycle, payroll run, leave, invoicing
• Permission model across employer admin, manager, employee, internal ops, and regional delivery partner roles
• Multi-country configuration: how one model absorbs different statutory regimes without forking per country
• A prioritised backlog with acceptance criteria, sized for a small engineering team
• An explicit list of what we will not build in year one, with reasoning

Deliverables:

By the end of week four:

1. Object model and entity relationship documentation
2. State machine specification for the core objects
3. Permission matrix — object by role
4. Backlog of user stories with acceptance criteria, estimates, dependencies and priority, covering at least eight weeks of engineering work
5. A "not building this year" list

Delivered into our working tooling, not as a static document. A PDF that sits in a drive is a failed engagement.

The final week is spent sitting in two sprint planning sessions with the engineering team. Delivery day is not the last day.

Who this is for:

• You have done this before, in a small team. You have written the first version of an HR or workforce product's data model — not managed a roadmap for a module of one that already existed. If you have been a founding PM, a head of product at an early-stage HR tech company, or a founder of one, that is the shape we are looking for.
• You have opinions about employment data. Effective dating, retroactive corrections, mid-cycle entity changes, the difference between when something is true and when the system learned it was true. If those phrases mean nothing to you, this is not your role.
• You have worked across the hiring-to-payroll boundary. Not necessarily all domains — but you understand what breaks when a candidate becomes an employee and nobody designed the handoff.
• You write specifications engineers can start on. Acceptance criteria that are testable. Dependencies that are named. Estimates that survive contact with a sprint.
• You work with the engineering lead, not around them. Our engineering lead co-authors this with you. If your process depends on delivering finished artefacts to a team that had no hand in them, we will not work well together.
• Backgrounds that map well: Employment Hero, Rippling, Deel, Multiplier, Skuad, or a regional HR platform where you owned the core record. We care more about what you designed than where you did it.
• Helpful, not required: conversational or agent-based interfaces; Southeast Asian statutory environments; EOR or partner-delivery operating models.

Terms

• Duration: four weeks, with extension by mutual agreement
• Commitment: substantial and concentrated — this is not two hours a week
• Location: Singapore preferred for the working sessions

Conditions we hold firmly: all work product and IP assign to the company. You confirm the engagement does not breach any existing employment, non-compete or confidentiality obligation. We are hiring you to structure our requirements — not to reproduce anyone else's specifications, roadmaps or confidential material.

How to apply:

Send a note to yuggie@marsconsuting.com.sg with:

1. One HR, payroll or workforce product whose core data model you personally designed — what it covered and what you would change now
2. Your availability over the next six weeks
3. Your fee expectation

Skip the cover letter. If you have a spec, model, or schema you can share without breaching confidentiality, that is worth more than a CV.

Come prepared to walk us through an employment data model on a whiteboard. That conversation is the interview.