Product Manager, Agentic Commerce in London

Checkout.com is seeking a Product Manager to define and build the infrastructure layer that will underpin the next generation of AI‑driven commerce. As AI agents become autonomous economic actors – browsing, deciding, and transacting on behalf of humans with no person present at the moment of payment – the payments stack requires a fundamental rethink. This role will own that rethink at Checkout.com.

The successful candidate will develop and execute a comprehensive strategy and roadmap for Agentic Commerce as a standalone product line, building towards P&L ownership as the role matures. They will work across Vault, Network Tokens, Account Updater, Authentication, and Orchestration to extend Checkout.com’s existing credential infrastructure for agent‑initiated payment flows, and will define the Know Your Agent (KYA) framework that makes those flows trustworthy, compliant, and commercially durable. This is a category‑defining role.

Key responsibilities:

• Roadmap Development and P&L Ownership: Lead the creation and maintenance of the Agentic Commerce roadmap for short, mid, and long‑term objectives, anchored to P&L commitments. Develop a strong understanding of the Agentic Commerce P&L and build towards ownership of revenue and cost inputs as the role matures, supporting executive reporting and investment cases. Plan and document initiatives on a monthly, quarterly, and semi‑annual basis to align with business goals and investment cycles. Define the commercial model for agent‑initiated payment flows, including pricing strategy across storage, lifecycle events, and per‑transaction components.
• Protocol Strategy and Industry Standards: Stay intimately familiar with the agentic commerce protocol landscape, including OpenAI ACP, Google UCP, Visa TAP, Mastercard Agent Pay, PayPal’s agentic flows, and the Machine Payments Protocol. Determine Checkout.com’s participation posture across each protocol: where to be an active contributor, where to be a compliant integrator, and where to build abstraction to remain protocol‑agnostic. Represent Checkout.com at industry forums, scheme working groups, and standards bodies to shape protocol development in Checkout.com’s favour and ensure appropriate recognition as a participant. Ensure our products comply with and leverage the latest authentication and identity standards as they apply to non‑human payment principals.
• Know Your Agent (KYA) Framework: Define and build Checkout.com’s trust and identity layer for agent‑initiated transactions – covering agent identity verification, consent management, spending mandate enforcement, and liability attribution at point of transaction. Work with Engineering, Legal, and Compliance to establish what agent identity means in practice within card scheme rails, under SCA requirements, and in the context of the EU AI Act. Develop frameworks for how Checkout.com’s obligations as both a deployer of AI systems and a provider of agentic commerce infrastructure interact, and ensure product design reflects those obligations.
• Credential Infrastructure for Agents: Own the product definition for how Vault, Network Tokens, Account Updater, and Delegated Tokenisation serve agentic use cases, including credential scoping, agent‑bound tokenisation, and session‑persistent versus persistent credential models. Partner with the Credential Lifecycle team to extend storage and lifecycle capabilities for agent‑initiated flows, including time‑limited mandate tokens and scoped authorisation. Define the developer surface for agent‑first integrations – APIs, SDKs, webhook architectures, and Forward API capabilities – ensuring agents can operate without re‑entering PCI scope boundaries.
• Agent‑Native Authentication: Work cross‑functionally with the Authentication product team to define authentication flows for non‑human actors, including how existing 3DS2 and SCA frameworks map to agentic contexts and where new primitives are required. Ensure that authentication design supports the trust model required for autonomous agent transactions, including progressive trust escalation and transaction‑level mandate verification.
• Thought Leadership: Act as Checkout.com’s subject matter expert on agentic commerce infrastructure, staying ahead of protocol developments, scheme announcements, and AI platform capabilities. Represent Checkout.com externally at industry events, conferences, and with key merchant and platform partners building agentic payment experiences.
• Stakeholder Communication: Actively communicate with stakeholders – including merchants, AI platform partners, scheme partners, and internal leadership – to gather insights and drive product growth. Provide regular updates on product progress, P&L performance, challenges, and opportunities, including to CEO‑level audiences.
• Cross‑functional Collaboration: Manage dependencies across teams to ensure seamless end‑to‑end capability for agentic flows. Collaborate closely with Legal and Compliance on EU AI Act obligations, PCI DSS v4 implications, and scheme liability frameworks as they apply to machine‑initiated transactions. Partner with commercial teams to structure new partnerships, determining revenue share, data rights, and liability allocation where the acquirer, agent platform, and end user are distinct principals.
• Product Discovery: Conduct thorough product discoveries to identify market needs across the emerging agentic commerce ecosystem, including gaps between existing payment infrastructure and what agent workflows require. Engage directly with AI platform partners, merchants building agentic experiences, and scheme partners to ground the product in real integration requirements. Communicate findings effectively with Engineering to ensure alignment on build priorities and technical architecture decisions.
• Risk and Fraud Frameworks: Define fraud and risk frameworks for machine‑initiated transactions – identifying where existing CNP models apply, where they break down, and what new signals are relevant in asynchronous agentic flows. Work with Risk, Compliance, and Engineering to ensure that controls designed for human commerce remain effective – or are replaced with appropriate equivalents – when transactions are agent‑initiated.
• Customer and Market Insights: Continuously gather and analyse merchant feedback, AI platform partner requirements, and market data to inform product decisions across the agentic commerce roadmap. Gain a deep understanding of how Checkout.com’s merchant base is approaching agentic commerce, and translate that into product priorities that serve both near‑term and long‑term needs.

About you:

• 3 – 5 years of product management experience, with demonstrable ownership of infrastructure or platform products.
• Deep, working knowledge of the card payment stack: PSP and acquirer architecture, authorisation flows, tokenisation (network tokens, PSP tokens, delegated tokenisation), PCI DSS scope, and scheme integrations.
• Familiarity with agentic AI systems – how large language model agents acquire and exercise permissions, tool use and planning loops, multi‑agent orchestration – and the payment infrastructure gaps these create.
• Data‑driven: skilled at leveraging data and business insights to determine strategic priorities, build P&L models, and drive roadmap prioritisation and execution.
• Customer‑first: able to think from the merchant’s and developer’s perspective, balancing long‑term infrastructure bets with immediate integration needs.
• End‑to‑end mindset: structured and diligent in understanding all components required for a product to succeed – from technical architecture through commercial model to go‑to‑market.
• Leadership: excellent at collaborating proactively with stakeholders across Engineering, Legal, Finance, Compliance, and commercial teams, with high EQ and strong influencing skills.
• Effective communicator: able to simplify technically complex concepts for a wide range of audiences, from engineering teams to the CEO.