Principal Product Manager, Fintech

Job Title: Principal Product Manager, Fintech
Team: Product
Location: Onsite - Sawtelle (Between Santa Monica & West LA) or San Francisco, CA
Employment Type: Full-time
Reports To: SVP of Product & Technology

About Plug

Plug is an automotive fintech startup building the marketplace for electric vehicles. Consumers, dealers, and commercial partners trade in, sell, and auction used EVs through a platform built exclusively for electric, with nothing adapted from legacy automotive.

Consumers can get an instant cash offer in minutes, backed by data-driven pricing, battery state-of-health analysis, with pickup, payment, and title transfer handled end-to-end. Franchise and independent dealers across the United States bid in real time on inventory sourced directly from these consumers, dealers, and commercial partners. The result is a single platform that gives sellers a fast, fair exit and gives dealers a dedicated channel for sourcing used EV inventory.

Founded in 2023 and led by former Tesla executives, Plug has facilitated $100M in EV sales since launch and is backed by a $20M Series A from Lightspeed Venture Partners. We're building the most AI-native startup team in Los Angeles, full of operators, engineers, and ML researchers laying the transaction rails for the used EV market's exponential growth.

Why Plug

• You'll own a piece of the biggest infrastructure opportunity in automotive.

• You'll work on a platform built exclusively for EVs, with nothing adapted from legacy automotive.

• You'll be part of an AI-native company. We're rethinking how work gets done at a fundamental level.

• You'll work directly with operators who have scaled multi-billion dollar businesses in automotive, EV, and marketplaces.

• You'll have real ownership, high autonomy, and a direct line to company outcomes.

The Opportunity

Every transaction on Plug - a consumer trade-in payout, a dealer's winning bid, a lien payoff to a lender, a title transfer - has money attached to it, and today that money moves through a patchwork of manual processes, bank wires, and one-off integrations. As Plug scales toward its next stage of growth, we need someone to turn that patchwork into real infrastructure: instant, reliable, and built to handle increasingly complex flows of funds across consumers, dealers, lenders, and banking partners.

We're hiring a Principal Product Manager, Fintech to own money movement, payments, and lending-adjacent product end-to-end, from a product standpoint - including every internal and external stakeholder relationship that touches the flow of funds. This is a director-level role by design: we need someone who can run the fintech stack independently, make sound calls under ambiguity, and manage bank, servicer, and partner relationships directly, without requiring hands-on involvement from company leadership on day-to-day fintech decisions.

What You'll Do

• Own the product strategy and roadmap for money movement across the platform: consumer payouts, dealer payments, auction settlement, lien payoffs, and title-related fund flows.

• Design and ship the systems that move money instantly and reliably at scale, replacing manual and semi-manual processes with real infrastructure.

• Manage and grow relationships with external partners - banks, payment processors, lien/title servicers, and lending partners - negotiating terms, integrations, and SLAs directly.

• Run the full flow of funds independently: from origination and disbursement through settlement, reconciliation, and payoff, with a clear view into where funds sit and why at every stage.

• Partner closely with Engineering, Risk, Finance, and Operations to ensure every dollar movement is compliant, auditable, and fast.

• Identify and scope opportunities to bring lending or financing-adjacent products into the platform (e.g., dealer floor plan, consumer bridge financing, payment plans) as the business grows.

• Build the operating rhythm, metrics, and monitoring needed to catch and resolve payment or settlement issues before they become customer-facing problems.

• Design partnership ecosystem and negotiate with banking and payments partners and help define which partnerships to pursue as the company scales.

What You'll Bring

• 7+ years in product management

• Meaningful time spent owning payments end-to-end at a marketplace or large payments platform company

• A track record of managing external stakeholders directly - banks, servicers, processors, or lending partners - including negotiating terms and owning the relationship, not just the integration.

• Direct experience with the mechanics of fund flows: settlement, disbursement, reconciliation, payoff processing, and the compliance and risk considerations that come with each.

• Demonstrated ability to operate independently at a senior level - this role is scoped for someone who can be the final decision-maker on fintech product questions, not someone who escalates most decisions upward.

• Comfort operating in an ambiguous, fast-moving environment where you're often the first and only product owner for a given domain.

• Strong technical fluency - you can go deep with engineers on system design, data models, and API tradeoffs for payment infrastructure.

• International or cross-border payments experience is a plus, but not required.

• Prior title, marketplace, or auction/lending experience in automotive or a comparable regulated industry is a plus.

• A bias toward building lean, fast infrastructure over off-the-shelf process - you'd rather ship the real solution than duct-tape a workaround.

Compensation and Benefits

Annual salary: P6 $222,465 - $255,174

Salary ranges reflect independent, third-party benchmarking against national compensation data. Where an individual's actual offer falls within that range depends on a combination of factors, including relevant experience, specialized skills, training and qualifications, current business needs, and prevailing market conditions. Ranges are reviewed periodically and may be adjusted to reflect changing market conditions.

Benefits & Perks:

• Health, Vision, and Dental insurance

• 401(k) plan

• 30 days work from anywhere per calendar year

• Daily lunch stipend

• Equity (based on role and performance)

• Unlimited PTO

• Fully stocked kitchen

• Dog-friendly office

• Ongoing opportunities for growth and development

This full-time position is an in-person role ideally based in Sawtelle (between Santa Monica and West Los Angeles). We are headquartered in Los Angeles and is our preferred location, with relocation assistance provided for successful candidates who need to relocate. Candidates already based in the San Francisco area will also be considered; relocation is not required for these candidates. Sponsorship is not available at this time.

Acknowledgments

Plug is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. We believe diverse teams build better products.