Principal Product Manager, Card Payments

Toast is driven by building the restaurant platform that helps restaurants adapt, take control, and get back to what they do best: building the businesses they love.

At the heart of that mission is Toast Payments — a modern, reliable, and deeply integrated platform that processed $ 150 B+ in GPV in 2024. We ensure every dollar from a guest’s tap, swipe, or online checkout moves accurately and on time into the restaurant’s bank account.

The Transactions team powers the engine behind every card payment on our platform — from authorization and capture to settlement, reversals, retries, and orchestration logic. We’re hiring a Principal Product Manager to lead strategy and execution for our Card Payments Processing domain, focusing on scalability, reliability, and extensibility.

This is a high-impact, highly cross-functional role. You’ll define and deliver core payment capabilities, evolve our transaction platform for global scale, and lead platform modernization efforts to meet the needs of enterprise and international customers. You’ll also explore opportunities for intelligent systems, such as ML-powered retry or routing strategies, to optimize success rates and reduce failure loops.

About this roll* (Responsibilities)

• Own the end-to-end product strategy and roadmap for Toast’s transaction processing engine — including authorization, capture, settlement, voids, reversals, retries, and orchestration.
• Design and deliver new payment capabilities such as new authorization types, ML-powered retry logic, intelligent dynamic routing strategies, etc.
• Interpret and apply card scheme rules and processor specifications (e.g., Visa, Mastercard, Amex) to ensure scalable and compliant implementation across the platform.
• Partner closely with engineering to modernize Toast’s transaction layer — including state management, asynchronous workflows, API contracts, and observability tooling.
• Improve platform resilience and traceability — including failure handling, dispute readiness, and reconciliation support.
• Collaborate with processors and partners to scope new integrations, manage certifications, and expand Toast’s global payment capabilities.
• Define KPIs and instrument metrics to monitor auth success, refund latency, retry effectiveness, and failure classification.
• Work cross-functionally with teams in Finance, Compliance, Legal, Risk, Engineering, and Customer Care to ensure holistic product delivery and operational integrity.
• Build internal tooling to provide real-time visibility into transaction lifecycles for support and debugging.
• Support internationalization of Toast’s transaction platform, adapting for local acquiring, regulatory nuances, and currency-specific flows.
• Champion the roadmap for intelligent, ML-informed decision-making in the transaction flow to maximize success and minimize downstream issues.

Do you have the right ingredients? (Requirements)

• 8+ years of product management experience, focusing on payments, fintech infrastructure, or transaction orchestration.
• Proven track record shipping complex capabilities in core payment flows — such as incremental auth, refund architecture, fallback handling, and multi-gateway orchestration.
• Strong technical fluency — you understand and can work from payment specifications, network mandates, and API definitions, and collaborate deeply with engineering on architecture and design.
• Deep familiarity with card networks, processors, and the end-to-end lifecycle of a transaction, from initiation to final settlement.
• Experience navigating regional payment differences, acquiring relationships, and compliance requirements across geographies.
• Skilled at leading platform-level initiatives involving distributed systems, asynchronous workflows, and system resilience.
• A natural influencer who can align senior engineers, operations leaders, and external partners around a compelling vision and roadmap.
• Clear and compelling communicator, both written and verbal — able to translate complex systems into crisp narratives for execs, peers, and partners.
• Data- and outcome-driven, relentlessly focused on real-world impact, system metrics, and customer success.
• Excited about building globally scalable payment systems and exploring intelligent optimization techniques (ML-based retry, dynamic routing, etc.).
• A strategic, systems-level thinker who thrives in ambiguity, takes ownership, and drives clarity in complex environments.