Senior Product Manager, Authorization Optimization

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, which manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Senior Product Manager, Authorization Optimization based in the United States.

This is a strategic and highly technical product leadership opportunity at the intersection of payments, fraud prevention, and digital commerce. You will own the authorization optimization product area, driving improvements in approval rates for legitimate transactions while protecting merchants against fraud and financial losses. Working closely with engineering, data science, and commercial teams, you will shape the product roadmap and turn complex payment challenges into scalable solutions. Your work will involve developing intelligent decisioning capabilities, strengthening payment integrations, and building partnerships across the payments ecosystem. You will use transaction-level insights and issuer intelligence to identify revenue opportunities and demonstrate measurable business impact. This remote role is ideal for a hands-on product leader who combines deep payments expertise, analytical thinking, and strong cross-functional influence.

Accountabilities
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Own the authorization optimization roadmap from strategy through delivery, setting priorities, sequencing initiatives, managing tradeoffs, and communicating decisions to leadership, engineering, and go-to-market teams.

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Determine the most effective approach to improving authorization performance, including when to build internal capabilities, orchestrate existing solutions, develop partnerships, or engage directly with issuers.

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Create detailed technical specifications, user stories, and acceptance criteria, while managing and prioritizing the engineering backlog.

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Define and evolve APIs, data models, and integration interfaces that enable authorization and decline data to flow between merchants, payment service providers (PSPs), issuers, and the platform.

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Identify, assess, and develop strategic partnerships with PSPs, payment gateways, acquirers, issuers, and technology or data providers.

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Build and maintain issuer and BIN-level intelligence to understand authorization performance, decline patterns, and treatment effectiveness.

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Develop a quantified opportunity map to identify recoverable revenue and prioritize the highest-impact optimization initiatives.

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Drive issuer-specific decisioning strategies across authentication step-ups, 3D Secure (3DS), decline recovery, intelligent retries, and payment routing where multiple PSP or acquirer options are available.

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Partner with data science teams to define risk-aware decisioning requirements that improve approval rates while balancing fraud exposure and chargeback risk.

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Own measurable authorization improvements and recovered merchant revenue, demonstrating results through proofs of value and issuer/BIN-level performance reporting.

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Collaborate with Sales, Solutions, and Customer Success teams to incorporate merchant feedback into product strategy and support successful adoption.

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Monitor developments in card network rules, payment regulations, and industry practices to ensure product requirements remain relevant and effective.

Requirements:

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At least 5 years of product management experience, including ownership of product roadmaps and end-to-end delivery.

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Hands-on experience developing payments products, with a deep understanding of issuer authorization behavior and payment performance optimization.

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Strong knowledge of decline recovery, intelligent retries, 3D Secure, and PSD2/SCA frameworks, including the upcoming transition to PSD3/PSR.

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Demonstrated success improving authorization performance and increasing approval rates for legitimate transactions.

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Experience writing detailed technical specifications and defining APIs, data models, or integration interfaces in partnership with engineering teams.

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Familiarity with backend systems or high-volume transaction processing environments.

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Strong analytical skills and the ability to work with transaction-level data, establish meaningful performance metrics, and quantify business impact.

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Experience collaborating closely with data science or analytics teams and translating analytical insights into actionable product requirements.

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Proven ability to influence and align cross-functional stakeholders without relying on direct reporting authority.

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Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Preferred qualifications:

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Experience working at a payment processor, PSP, acquirer, card network, issuer, or fraud and risk technology provider.

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Exposure to fraud prevention, risk management, or digital identity products, particularly the tradeoff between false declines and fraud losses.

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Experience defining requirements for machine-learning-driven decisioning systems.

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Familiarity with 3DS/EMVCo standards, tokenization, ISO 8583, and PSD2/SCA.

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Background in B2B SaaS or enterprise e-commerce merchant solutions.

Benefits:

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Annual base salary by U.S. pay zone:

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Tier 1 – New York City, San Francisco Bay Area, and Seattle: $165,000–$205,000 .

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Tier 2 – Washington, D.C. Metro, Austin, Chicago, Denver, Boston, Los Angeles, and San Diego: $155,000–$195,000 .

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Tier 3 – All other U.S. locations: $145,000–$185,000 .

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Stock option grant eligibility of 7,000 options , subject to position level and internal compensation guidelines.

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Annual performance bonus opportunity of up to 10% of base salary .

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Unlimited discretionary time off.

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401(k) matching.

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Annual performance bonus or commission eligibility, as applicable.

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12 weeks of paid parental leave.

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Health, dental, and vision insurance.

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Flexible Spending Account (FSA).

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Short-term and long-term disability insurance.

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Life insurance.

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On-demand therapy and counseling access for employees and their dependents.

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Dedicated professional development and learning budget through Learnerbly.

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Company social events and branded merchandise.

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Remote work opportunity within the United States.