Senior Platform Product Manager

At Koalafi, we partner with merchants to offer flexible lease-to-own financing to consumers, helping merchants increase sales while giving customers more ways to pay over time. Every product experience we ship, for consumers, merchants, and internal teams, is built on a shared technical foundation that must be reliable, scalable, and easy to build on.

We're looking for a Senior Platform Product Manager to own those capabilities. In this role, you'll lead the Shared Tech team, a cross-cutting engineering group responsible for the event bus, communications gateway, and key modernization initiatives that other product teams build on. Your work won't always be visible to end users, but it will be felt across every team and product at Koalafi.

This is the right role for a systems-minded product manager who thrives when solving hard platform and infrastructure problems, where shared services, developer experience, data foundations, and reliability must work together at scale. You have enough technical fluency to partner closely with engineers and data teams, and know how to translate organizational needs into clear platform capabilities. You’ll align cross-functional stakeholders on a strategy that makes every product team at Koalafi faster and more confident in what they ship.

This individual contributor role reports directly to the Senior Director of Product. You will partner tightly with the Shared Tech Lead and collaborate across every product and engineering team at Koalafi.

• Lead prioritization and facilitate thoughtful tradeoffs with engineering and product stakeholders, balancing developer velocity, reliability, and long-term platform health
• Align engineering leads and product teams on what platform investments matter most and why
• Lead ongoing discovery with internal engineering teams to surface needs, blockers, and gaps, then translate them into cohesive, reusable platform capabilities

• Partner continuously with engineering to define the what and the why, while empowering the team to determine the how
• Maintain a prioritized backlog with crisp epics and stories, clear acceptance criteria, and measurable outcomes
• Define success metrics and measurement plans

• Event Bus - own the strategy and roadmap for Koalafi's internal event infrastructure; ensure it is reliable, well-documented, and easy for product teams to adopt and extend
• Communications Gateway - own the platform that routes and delivers consumer and merchant communications across channels; ensure it is scalable, auditable, and supports the needs of product teams without requiring bespoke solutions
• Modernization Priorities - partner with engineering to identify, scope, and sequence the highest-impact investments in platform modernization; create the clarity needed for teams to migrate off legacy systems safely and incrementally
• Drive operational excellence by treating performance, reliability, observability, and auditability as foundational requirements

• Partner closely with the Shared Tech Lead to set direction, make tradeoffs, and deliver high-quality platform improvements
• Conduct ongoing discovery with internal engineering and product teams to understand pain points, integration needs, and unmet gaps
• Collaborate with teams across Consumer, Merchant, Credit, and Operations to understand how shared platform capabilities support their roadmaps and where they fall short
• Partner with Security and Compliance to ensure platform services meet the company's regulatory and security requirements
• Build internal communication practices around platform changes, adoption guides, migration timelines, and deprecation notices, so teams can plan around platform evolution

• 5+ years of product management experience with a focus on building and shipping technical, platform, or shared-services products
• Strong systems thinker with enough technical fluency to earn engineers' trust, translate their needs into a roadmap, and make sound tradeoffs between short-term wins and long-term platform health
• Demonstrated ability to lead and influence cross-functional teams toward a common goal without direct authority, with excellent written and verbal communication across technical and non-technical audiences
• Comfortable operating in ambiguous environments - able to create structure, clarity, and momentum where none exists
• Experience using data and instrumentation to inform prioritization and evaluate the success of platform investments
• Strong passion for AI and LLMs and their potential to unlock efficiencies; actively follows the space and brings a point of view on where these technologies can create meaningful leverage in platform products and internal workflows
• Location Requirement: This position requires regular in-person attendance at one of our two office locations (Richmond, VA or Arlington, VA). Candidates must already be located within a commutable distance to either location, as relocation assistance is not available at this time.

• Experience in fintech, lending, or regulated-industry engineering environments
• Familiarity with observability tooling, data infrastructure, or API platform work
• Exposure to developer experience programs, internal developer portals, or platform engineering practices
• Background working with or alongside Security and Compliance in a financial services context

• We focus on what’s most important
• We set clear expectations and deliver
• We embrace challenges to reach our full potential
• We ask, “How can this be better?”
• We move fast together