Product Manager, Payments

About Stash

Stash is the direct-to-consumer commerce platform for game studios. We build the webshops, checkout experiences, and merchant-of-record infrastructure that let games sell directly to players — cutting the 30% app store tax and increasing LTV. Leading game studios run their direct-to-player commerce on Stash, and we already process hundreds of millions of dollars a year in D2C revenue. We're scaling fast toward a 5x volume target in 2026, and we're building out the product team to match.

About the role

As our first dedicated Payments PM, you'll own payments end to end across every Stash surface — Stash Pay, Webshop, and beyond. That means authorization/approval rate optimization, multiprocessor and acquirer routing (including failover and cascading across PSPs), retry and recovery logic for failed or declined transactions, fraud-vs-conversion tradeoffs, and Merchant-of-Record obligations (tax compliance, disputes/chargebacks, regional payment compliance).

This is not a checkout-UX role — checkout UX, conversion into checkout, and partner integration experience are owned by our Checkout PM. You'll touch the checkout surface only where a payments decision surfaces there (e.g., a retry or alternate-method prompt after a decline), not to redesign the buying flow itself. You're tied to the product, not to individual partners: your job is to turn partner-specific payment failures into systemic routing, retry, and fraud improvements. Authorization/approval rate and payment success rate are the north star metrics of this role.

We're aiming for a payments engine that's best-in-class for approval rates, resilience, and cost — on par with the bar set by Stripe Payments, Adyen, and orchestration platforms like Primer and Spreedly.

This is a high-agency, build-it-from-scratch role. There's no existing playbook — you'll create one, and you'll be the final call on payments decisions.

Leveling

We're open to candidates across multiple experience levels. The final title and scope of the role will be determined based on your experience, strengths, and the level of ownership you're ready to take on.

Location

This is a remote role open to candidates based in the United States or Canada, preferably in the West Coast time zone.

What you'll do

• Act as the translation layer between payments operations, compliance, and the engineering team — turning operational needs and business risk into clear, prioritized requirements engineers can build against

• Own and maintain the company-wide payments roadmap: translate business priorities into an effort-estimated, impact-sized backlog, and be the single accountable owner of sprint planning and prioritization for the payments eng team

• Define and own authorization/approval rate, payment success rate, false decline rate, and cost-per-transaction as core business KPIs; turn the gap against industry benchmarks (healthy e-commerce card-not-present authorization rates typically run 85–95%, with 90%+ considered well-optimized) into a prioritized set of requirements for engineering

• Build the business case and scoped requirements for multiprocessor/acquirer routing and failover, so engineering can build smart routing that keeps a single processor outage or high-decline processor from materially denting revenue

• Prioritize and scope retry and recovery logic improvements with engineering, weighing recovered revenue against fraud exposure

• Own the fraud-vs-conversion tradeoff as a business decision: set the target for reducing false declines and the acceptable chargeback/dispute threshold, then translate that into prioritized engineering work

• Translate Merchant-of-Record obligations (tax compliance, disputes/chargebacks, regional payment compliance) into product requirements the engineering team can plan and ship against

• In your first 90 days: learn our PSP/acquirer integrations, routing logic, retry/recovery, fraud rules, and MoR/tax stack well enough to translate operational needs into scoped, prioritized engineering requirements — not to become a payments engineer yourself; establish baseline metrics and identify the top 3 sources of failed or declined transactions; take over sprint planning for the payments eng team; and ship one meaningful, metrics-backed improvement to approval rate or payment success rate

What we're looking for

• High agency and ownership — you're comfortable being the first dedicated payments PM, building structure from scratch, and being the final call on payments decisions

• An MVP, incremental-build mindset — you scope down, ship iteratively, and push back on scope creep

• Tight project management execution — you run a disciplined roadmap and hold timelines and commitments without slippage

• Payments/processing domain expertise — solid working knowledge of multiprocessor routing and a feel for where and why transactions fail

• Data and experimentation rigor — you instrument payment funnels, run holdback/A-B tests on routing and retry logic, and let approval-rate data (not opinion) drive prioritization

• A generalization instinct — you turn partner-specific payment failures into systemic product fixes

• Clear communication — specs, roadmap updates that land with engineering, sales, and leadership

Requirements

• Background at a tech/SaaS or payments/fintech company, with direct, hands-on ownership of a payments/processing surface

• Direct, hands-on experience collaborating with engineering teams

• Comfortable overlap West Coast hours given where our product and payments strategy is concentrated

Why Stash?

• Work on products used by some of the world's leading game studios

• Own a core product area with significant autonomy and impact

• Help shape the future of direct-to-consumer commerce in gaming

• Join a lean, ambitious, and highly collaborative team building products at scale