Our client is a UK-headquartered fintech scale-up operating at the heart of open banking. Their API platform connects businesses to banks across Europe, enabling account-to-account payments and access to financial data, and is relied upon by leading technology and payments brands as core infrastructure. With regulation and AI reshaping how money and data move, they are investing in the platform foundations that will carry their next phase of growth, including how enterprise customers, and increasingly AI agents, connect to it.
The Role
This is the product role that owns the core of the platform: the account, identity, and access layer that every other product is built on and that thousands of customers integrate with. You will set the strategy and standards for these foundational services, own the API contracts that internal teams and external customers depend on, and make sure they can evolve without breaking anyone downstream.
Beyond the core, you will own the data products built on top of it — analytics and reporting APIs with real commercial potential — and the enterprise capabilities (SSO, granular access control, audit, entitlements) that support the company’s move upmarket. A distinctive frontier of the role is extending identity and access to AI agents and machine identities, with modern authorisation patterns to match.
You will sit within the product team as an individual contributor, reporting to a senior product leader, working day-to-day with engineering and partnering with commercial and marketing on pricing, packaging and go-to-market. It suits a systems thinker who is credible in an architecture review and equally comfortable in a commercial conversation.
Key Responsibilities
- Define and drive the strategy, roadmap and data models for the platform’s core services — accounts, identity and access — and the API gateway that exposes them
- Expose these services as clean, well-versioned APIs in partnership with the API governance function, evolving them without breaking dependent teams or customers
- Take the platform’s data products — analytics and reporting APIs — from discovery through launch, iteration and monetisation
- Build out the enterprise feature set that supports the move upmarket: single sign-on, role-based access, audit, usage and entitlements, and multi-organisation support
- Extend identity and access to AI agents and machine identities, with scoped, time-bound, revocable and auditable credentials, and authorisation flows that respect end-user consent
- Own the platform’s integrations with the systems the business runs on — billing, CRM and compliance tooling — keeping accounts, usage and entitlements consistent end to end
- Balance the competing demands of multiple product teams and customers, weighing foundational investment against near‑term asks, and making confident build‑versus‑buy calls
- Work with security, privacy and legal to ensure the platform meets its obligations in a regulated environment
- Define and track the metrics that matter for a platform: internal adoption, reliability and latency, data quality, and the satisfaction of the teams and customers building on it
Your Profile
- 5+ years in product management with a strong track record on platform, infrastructure or API products
- Technically fluent: able to lead architecture and API discussions, weigh trade‑offs and review designs with engineers
- A systems thinker who has owned foundational services or platform primitives — identity, accounts, permissions or an API gateway — including the contracts and versioning that keep consumers stable
- Familiar with multi‑tenant architecture and the building blocks of enterprise access: RBAC/ABAC, SSO, SCIM, and standards such as OAuth2, SAML and OpenID Connect
- Has built products on top of data (analytics or reporting APIs), or has a clear grasp of what that takes
- Experienced in integrating core business systems — billing, CRM, entitlements — and keeping data consistent across them
- A strong cross‑functional operator: able to align stakeholders, drive outcomes through teams you don’t manage, and explain technical trade‑offs to any audience
- Commercially fluent: understands enterprise buyers and partners well with commercial and marketing on packaging and go‑to‑market
- Experience in a regulated industry — fintech, payments or banking — and comfortable with the obligations of handling sensitive data
Valuable extras: a background in open banking, Open Finance or financial infrastructure; experience taking a platform upmarket to enterprise customers; API lifecycle management (versioning, deprecation, backward compatibility); and familiarity with agent identity and modern authorisation patterns such as OAuth scopes, on‑behalf‑of delegation and MCP‑style auth.
Early Success
Within the first six to twelve months, you will have mapped the platform’s core services and their consumers, established clear ownership of the API contracts and a versioning approach teams trust, shipped the first monetised iteration of the data products, and put the enterprise access foundations — and the first agent‑identity capabilities — on a credible roadmap that commercial teams can sell against.
Why Join
- Own the layer everything else is built on — rare end‑to‑end platform scope, from identity primitives to monetised data products
- Work at the frontier of agent identity and machine‑to‑machine authorisation, one of the most consequential open problems in financial infrastructure
- Genuine commercial exposure: pricing, packaging and enterprise go‑to‑market, not just backlog management
- A collaborative, low‑ego product and engineering culture with a bias for action and high individual ownership
- Hybrid working with real flexibility, including the option to work abroad for part of the year
Senior Product Manager Core Platform & Data employer: Payments & Cards Network
Join a dynamic and profitable financial infrastructure company that is at the forefront of the evolving payments landscape. With a culture that values quality, curiosity, and integrity, you will have genuine ownership in your role as Sales Director, working closely with the CEO and influencing go-to-market strategies. The company offers uncapped earning potential and a fast-paced environment that fosters continuous improvement and personal growth, making it an excellent employer for those passionate about driving innovation in the financial sector.
Contact Details:
Payments & Cards Network Recruitment Team