Senior Product Manager in Belfast

Apex is seeking a Senior Product Manager to lead the Client Platforms and Configuration product suite within Ascend. This is a strategic role at the heart of Ascend's growth: you will own the configuration layer that underpins every product team's ability to deliver firm‐specific, market‐specific, and jurisdiction‐specific capabilities to our clients. You will be responsible for the ongoing evolution of Client Configuration and provisioning, serving as the central product manager for how firms are set up, configured, and managed across the Ascend platform.

You will partner with product teams across the organization to facilitate their domain‐specific configuration needs while leading the design and delivery of a new firm‐level configuration architecture that will power Ascend's ambitions and support increasingly complex multi‐market, multi‐entity, and multi‐jurisdictional requirements. This role requires a strategic thinker who can balance the operational demands of a production platform serving millions of accounts with the forward‐looking architecture needed to scale Ascend significantly beyond its current scope.

• Product strategy and roadmap
  • Define and own the Client Platforms and Configuration vision and multi‐quarter roadmap within Ascend, balancing operational reliability, product team enablement, and platform scale.
  • Lead the strategic initiative to design and deliver a firm‐level configuration layer that supports international expansion, multi‐jurisdiction requirements, and increasingly complex client structures.
  • Prioritize initiatives using data‐driven insights, client feedback, and cross‐team dependencies to maximize platform scalability and onboarding efficiency.
  • Build business cases with clear outcomes, investment, and ROI; align stakeholders around priorities and trade‐offs.
• Cross‐domain configuration enablement
  • Serve as the central product partner for domain product teams (Trading, Investor Communications, Billing, Cash Management, Account Services, etc.), enabling them to define and manage their domain‐specific configuration within a unified framework.
  • Establish standards, patterns, and self‐service capabilities that allow product teams to extend configuration without creating fragmentation or technical debt.
  • Define and maintain the configuration data model that governs firm‐level settings, product entitlements, feature flags, and domain‐specific parameters.
  • Facilitate cross‐team alignment on configuration schema, validation rules, and dependency management.
• Platform and API ownership
  • Define RESTful APIs and event models for client configuration, provisioning, entitlements, and firm management; ensure excellent developer experience, documentation, and sandbox coverage.
  • Partner with engineering on data integrity, observability, and resiliency to support a configuration layer that underpins all Ascend services.
  • Establish SLOs for configuration propagation latency, accuracy, and availability; instrument monitoring and alerting for end‐to‐end reliability.
• Client onboarding and operational excellence
  • Own and continuously improve the client onboarding experience, reducing time‐to‐live and manual intervention required to provision new correspondent firms.
  • Define and monitor KPIs such as onboarding cycle time, configuration error rate, provisioning success rate, time‐to‐propagation, and self‐service adoption.
  • Lead continuous improvement through automation, validation tooling, and root‐cause analysis for configuration‐related incidents.
• Cross‐functional leadership
  • Run effective ceremonies, backlog grooming, and release planning across one or more squads.
  • Coordinate with Operations, Client Success, Engineering, and product domain teams to ensure readiness, training, and smooth client rollouts.
  • Communicate status, risks, and outcomes to senior stakeholders and key clients.

• Bachelor's degree in Business, Computer Science, Engineering, or related field; advanced degree a plus.
• 8+ years of product management experience, with 3+ years building or operating platform configuration systems, client provisioning tools, multi‐tenant SaaS platforms, or enterprise administration and setup products in fintech, brokerage/custody, or wealth management.
• Demonstrated success shipping API‐first, event‐driven, or microservices‐based products at scale.

• Industry and platform depth
  • Familiarity with brokerage/custody operations, including client onboarding, firm‐level configuration, entitlements management, and correspondent clearing relationships.
  • Experience designing configuration systems that support multi‐market, multi‐jurisdiction, or multi‐entity requirements.
• Technical proficiency
  • Experience with relational data modeling for configuration and provisioning systems, including schema design, validation, and versioning.
  • Understanding of RESTful API best practices and event streaming; experience with observability, logging, and SLA/SLO design.
  • Familiarity with feature flag systems, entitlement frameworks, or configuration‐as‐code patterns.
• Scale and complexity
  • Track record managing platform products that serve as foundational dependencies for multiple product teams and services.
  • Experience with complex data migration, backward compatibility, and configuration schema evolution in production systems.
• Client and program leadership
  • Proven track record leading complex cross‐functional programs and presenting to senior stakeholders and clients.
  • Experience supporting international product expansion or multi‐market platform rollouts.

• Exceptional written and verbal communication, including requirements writing, API/product documentation, and stakeholder presentations.
• Strong analytical skills; proficiency with SQL and BI tools to instrument and monitor platform health metrics (e.g., onboarding cycle time, configuration accuracy, propagation latency).
• Agile delivery expertise; adept at decomposing complex platform requirements into incremental, testable product slices.
• Systems thinking; ability to understand and manage cross‐service dependencies, data flow, and configuration propagation across a distributed platform.
• Influence without authority; ability to align Engineering, Operations, Compliance, and multiple product teams around shared standards and outcomes.

Please note this job description is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of activities, duties, or responsibilities required of the employee for this job. Duties, responsibilities, and activities may change at any time with or without notice.

• Robust package of employee perks and benefits, including a market‐leading salary with an annual bonus, 28 days of annual leave plus 10 Northern Ireland national holidays, a training and development budget, and a pension matched up to 7%.
• Private health insurance for medical, dental, and optical care, and life insurance.
• Flexible working hours, parental leave, a modern city centre office, and a hybrid work schedule that allows for greater flexibility by partially working from home.
• Monthly catered lunches, unlimited drinks and snacks, hackathon events, poker tournaments, and a charitable matching gift program.

Apex Fintech Solutions is an equal opportunity employer that does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, and gender identity), national origin, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, or any other protected characteristic. Our hiring practices ensure that all qualified applicants receive fair consideration without regard to these characteristics.

Apex Fintech Solutions is committed to creating an inclusive and accessible workplace for all candidates, including those with disabilities. We are dedicated to ensuring equal employment opportunities and providing reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities. If you require reasonable accommodations to participate in the application or interview process, please submit your request via the Candidate Accommodation Requests Form. We will work with you to provide the necessary accommodations to ensure your full participation in our hiring process.