Principal Product Manager, Real-time Payments Platform

SoFi SoFi · Fintech · San Francisco, CA · Product Management

SoFi is seeking a Principal Product Manager to own their real-time payments platform, focusing on vision, strategy, and roadmap for various payment rails including FedNow, Fedwire, and instant debit. The role involves scaling capabilities to new business lines, partnering with Risk and Compliance, managing vendor relationships, driving operational excellence, and defining key metrics. Requires deep understanding of payment rails, platform product management, payment orchestration, vendor management, compliance, and strong analytical and communication skills.

What you'd actually do

  1. Own the vision, strategy, and roadmap for SoFi's real-time payments platform, including FedNow, Fedwire, instant debit (Visa Direct, Mastercard Send), and future real-time rails.
  2. Scale real-time capabilities to new business lines — champion the real-time payments services internally, evangelize the value of Bank Platform adoption to other business units, and build a roadmap to onboard new use cases so that all relevant SoFi products benefit from real-time money movement capabilities
  3. Partner with Risk and Compliance and Operations to ensure real-time payments are secure, compliant, and resilient and every penny is accounted for
  4. Manage vendor and partner relationships — including Galileo (Payment Hub), the Federal Reserve (FedNow, Fedwire), The Clearing House (RTP), and card network partners — to influence roadmaps, negotiate terms, and ensure SoFi's needs are met.
  5. Drive operational excellence — define SLAs, monitor platform health, reduce failure rates, and build operational tooling that enables support teams to resolve issues quickly.
  6. Instrument and measure — define the metrics that matter (transaction success rate, speed, funds availability, cost per transaction, fraud rates, complaints per rail) and build the data infrastructure to track them.

Skills

Required

  • 8+ years of product management experience, with significant time in payments, financial infrastructure, or money movement platforms.
  • Deep understanding of payment rails — you can explain the difference between FedNow, Fedwire, RTP, ACH, and card-based instant payments in your sleep. You understand message formats, settlement mechanics, cutoff times, and regulatory requirements for each.
  • Platform product management experience — you've built infrastructure or platform products that serve multiple internal or external customers, not just a single consumer surface. You think in APIs, contracts, and capabilities, not just screens.
  • Experience with payment orchestration — routing logic, fallback strategies, rail selection, transaction lifecycle management. Ideally you've worked with or built a payment hub or gateway.
  • Vendor and partner management chops — you've managed relationships with processors, networks, or infrastructure vendors. You know how to influence a partner's roadmap when you're not their biggest customer.
  • Comfort with compliance and risk — you understand AML/KYC/OFAC requirements for real-time payments, Reg E implications, and how to design for compliance without killing the user experience.
  • Strong analytical skills — you use data to identify problems, size opportunities, and make decisions. You can define and instrument metrics from scratch when the data doesn't exist yet.
  • Excellent communication — you can translate complex technical infrastructure into clear narratives for executive leadership, business partners, and operations teams.

Nice to have

  • Experience at a bank, neobank, or bank-as-a-service provider (not just a fintech that rides on someone else's charter).
  • Familiarity with Galileo's platform (Payment Hub, Cyberbank Core) or similar core banking processors.
  • Experience building for both consumer and commercial (B2B) use cases on the same platform.
  • Background in real-time gross settlement (RTGS) systems, cross-border payments, or correspondent banking.
  • Technical depth — you can read an API spec, review an architecture diagram, or write a SQL query to investigate an issue. You don't need to code, but you're credible with engineers.

What the JD emphasized

  • Deep understanding of payment rails
  • Platform product management experience
  • Experience with payment orchestration
  • Vendor and partner management chops
  • Comfort with compliance and risk
  • Strong analytical skills
  • Experience at a bank, neobank, or bank-as-a-service provider