Job Summary:
Lightspark is building the open payment protocol for the Internet making money move like data. As the Staff Product Manager for Payments Orchestration & Intelligence, you will own the strategy for the AI Routing and Grid Switch, optimizing how money is routed across global financial networks to maximize success and minimize cost.
Responsibilities:
โข Lead Payment Orchestration: Define the roadmap for our AI Router and Grid Switch, building the intelligent pathfinding logic that optimizes for transaction success rates (TSR), latency, and cost.
โข Scale Global Connectivity: Drive the expansion into domestic payment rails (e.g., SPEI, UPI, SEPA) and manage the technical and regulatory complexities of global interoperability.
โข Own the "Closed Loop": Design the strategy for internal and customer-facing observability dashboards and automated reconciliation workflows to ensure institutional-grade financial integrity.
โข Drive Vertical Innovation: Lead high-value customer engagements from initial scoping to deployment, owning the end-to-end delivery of feature sets like P2P/B2B payments and regional pay-in solutions.
โข Negotiate Network Resilience: Partner with Business Development to engage with financial partners, negotiating limits and unlocking new feature expansions to ensure a robust, high-performance network.
โข Future-Proof the Stack: Collaborate with Engineering to influence long-term architecture that supports emerging use cases, including Agentic Commerce and LLM-driven transaction flows.
โข Maximize Impact with AI: Leverage AI and automation to accelerate product development lifecycles and enhance the efficiency of our ledger and routing capabilities.
Qualifications:
Required:
โข 7+ years of experience in global payment infrastructure.
โข Under-the-hood knowledge of funds flows and understanding of how domestic rails settle.
โข Comfortable collaborating with engineers on backend system architecture.
โข Ability to navigate complex partner negotiations with Business Development.
โข Proven track record of bringing clarity to ambiguous environments.
โข Experience building scalable B2B solutions from scratch.
โข Effectively use AI tools to amplify impact.
โข Genuine curiosity for how rapidly changing technologies can be integrated into payment systems.
โข Thrive in fast-paced startup environments.
โข Ready to roll up sleeves to solve detailed money movement challenges at scale.
โข Obsess over edge cases, failure scenarios, and performance benchmarks (SLAs).
Preferred:
โข Familiarity with digital assets, the Lightning Network, or programmable money.
Company:
Builds payments infrastructure for digital banks, wallets and exchanges, real-time global money movement for Bitcoin, fiat, and stablecoins. Founded in 2022, the company is headquartered in Los Angeles, USA, with a team of 51-200 employees. The company is currently Growth Stage.