Senior Product Manager, Compliance

The short version

Every package Portless ships crosses a border, and every one of them carries a set of compliance obligations: how the product is classified, what value is declared, what duties and taxes apply, and what each destination market requires. Today that gets done. It gets done through a mix of partners, internal tooling, and manual work, and it holds together well enough that merchants ship.

That's the problem. "Well enough" is not a product, and it isn't a moat.

Compliance should be one of the strongest reasons a brand chooses Portless over anyone else. Getting there requires someone who can look at the whole flow end to end, decide what we own versus what we source from the market, and build a coherent system out of what is currently a set of individually reasonable decisions.

We're hiring a Senior Product Manager to own that.
About Portless

Portless is changing the face of global e-commerce. By decoupling brands from traditional, expensive domestic warehousing, we let e-commerce companies ship directly from manufacturing hubs to global consumers in as little as three to five days.

We move packages to 75+ countries for hundreds of DTC brands, with 2.5 million+ cross-border packages shipped, 99.8% pick-and-pack accuracy, and 98% on-time delivery. We're a small, remote-first team, and the work you do here shows up in a merchant's business within weeks.
Why we need this role now

- Compliance has no clear product direction. We work with multiple compliance partners and we've built real integration infrastructure to support them. What we haven't decided is what Portless itself offers as a compliance product, and that decision is now blocking several others.

- Build, buy, or partner is an open question with real money behind it. Some of this capability is genuinely commoditized and should be bought. Some of it is close enough to our core that owning it is a differentiator. Nobody has done the work to draw that line and defend it.

- The data problem is upstream of everything. Compliance decisions depend on product data that originates in merchant catalogs of wildly varying quality, then flows through several systems before it reaches a customs declaration. Every downstream problem traces back to where that data came from and whether anyone validated it. We're operating at a scale where that's now hundreds of thousands of SKUs.

- The manual work is real and it's growing. Audits, escalations, chasing merchants for missing data, gating SKUs that aren't ready. Our ops and CS teams absorb this today. Product should be removing it, not watching it scale.

- Merchants can't see any of it. They don't know their compliance exposure, they can't self-serve a fix, and we can't show them the value we're providing. That's a product gap and a commercial one.

What you'll own

The end-to-end compliance flow. Not one feature area. The whole path from merchant catalog to cleared shipment: where the data originates, how it's validated, where it's enriched, what's stored, what gets declared, and what happens when something is missing or wrong. You'll be the person who can hold the entire flow in their head and see where it breaks.

The strategy, and the case for it. What Portless owns, what we buy, and what we partner for. This is a genuine open decision with strong opinions on multiple sides, and we'll expect you to form a view, argue it with data, and then be accountable for it.

Data quality as a product outcome. Classification coverage and accuracy, declared values, country of origin, and the rest, treated as tracked metrics with systems behind them rather than a recurring cleanup project.

Prevention over cleanup. The mechanisms that stop a non-compliant SKU from becoming a stuck shipment or a wrong invoice: validation at intake, gating, escalation, and the merchant-facing flows that make it easy for a brand to fix their own data.

The merchant-facing product. How compliance shows up in the portal, how a merchant unders