Director of Product Management, Payments

Director of Product, Payments 

Guild is hiring a Director of Product, Payments, to lead the team building how money moves across Guild. You'll own the strategy for Guild's payment network - the infrastructure that funds education between employers, Guild, and learning providers - and lead a team of product managers expanding our offering to a flexible menu of payment modalities that expands Guild’s ability to meet discrete finance needs in the context of a benefit. This is a leadership role with a broad remit: defining payment network strategy, leading a world-class team, and building the core of a product that impacts millions of learners in the US. 

To be eligible, you must have established experience building payments products before at a payments company, a fintech, or a platform that embedded card issuing and money movement into its product. The ideal candidate has done that work on a global scale. You bring a sharp point of view on payments economics, a willingness to challenge the status quo, and the commercial and financial fluency to be a true partner to Finance, Commercial, and the leadership team. If that sounds like you, read on!

What You'll Do

• Payment Network Strategy & Ownership: Own the multi-year strategy for Guild's payment network — how users on all three sides of the marketplace fund education through Guild, spanning virtual cards, reimbursement, and other transaction modalities. Set the vision, make the calls on sequencing and investment, and be accountable for the outcomes.
• Team Leadership: Lead, coach, and grow a team of product managers across payment modalities and platform capabilities. Set the bar for product craft, build a strong operating rhythm, and develop PMs into leaders.
• Zero-to-One and Scale: Guide the team from concept through vendor selection, pilot, and scale - shipping quickly, learning, and iterating - while knowing when to step in on high-stakes decisions and when to let the team run.
• AI-Native Product Development: Set the expectation that your team builds and operates with AI where appropriate, and identify where AI materially improves the product itself, and at what level.
• Vendor & Network Partnerships: Help facilitate Guild's relationships with processors, card networks, and money movement partners. Assist commercial negotiations on economics, SLAs, and roadmap alignment, and manage the partner portfolio over time.
• Payments Economics & Pricing: Partner with stakeholders on pricing, packaging, and business cases; challenge assumptions and bring an informed outside perspective to Guild’s monetization strategy.
• Cross-Functional Leadership: Represent payments strategy in executive and leadership-level conversations. Align Engineering, Finance, Legal, Commercial, and Operations around a shared roadmap, and resolve trade-offs across them.
• Compliance, Risk & Program Governance: Partner with Legal, Compliance, and Finance to set the governance framework for card issuing and money movement - spend controls, reconciliation, settlement, fraud prevention, and program oversight - and make sure the team builds to it.
• Funding Service Optimization: Set and drive the strategy for Guild's funding service, improving speed, reliability, working capital efficiency, and cost per transaction.

Global Scale. Build capability sets with a global-first approach, serving as a subject matter expert on globalization, including specific expertise around currency handling, localization, and international markets.

What You'll Bring

• Experience: 10+ years of product management experience, including significant time building payments products - card issuing, virtual cards, money movement, or B2B payment flows - at a fintech or payments company or in an embedded payments role at a platform company. Bonus if this experience has been global. 
• People Leadership: 5+ years managing product managers, with a track record of developing PMs, running a healthy team, and raising the quality bar.
• Payments Domain Depth: Fluency in the mechanics of card issuing and money movement, and the vendor ecosystem behind them. Experience with cross-border payments is a plus.
• Strategic Track Record: Demonstrated success setting and executing a multi-year payments strategy, including business case building, and taking products from zero to launch and scaling through ambiguity.
• Deal-Making: Experience facilitating third-party vendor and network partnerships end to end - sourcing, negotiating, and managing them - and partnering with commercial and legal teams on terms and economics.
• Financial Fluency: Comfort building and defending financial models; able to work as a peer with Finance on unit economics, pricing, and working capital, and to challenge the status quo when the numbers say so.
• Technical Fluency: Able to go deep with engineers on API design, integration architecture, and build-vs-buy trade-offs; engineering leaders trust your judgment and instincts.
• AI Fluency: You use AI tools daily in your own work and have a point of view on where they change how product teams operate. You can separate the real opportunities in payments (risk, reconciliation, support, emerging agentic payment flows) from the hype, and you hold your team to a high bar for using it well.
• Leadership Presence: Equally comfortable presenting strategy to the executive team, digging into transaction-level data with your PMs, and sitting with a customer to understand why a payment flow fails them.
  
  
  We are committed to equal pay for equal work and believe in compensation transparency. All salary ranges are standardized nationwide and will not vary by region. This role offers a competitive total compensation package, including a base salary of $220,000 - $270,000, variable compensation and stock options. Compensation offered will be based on a combination of factors such as experience, competencies, and internal equity.
  
  Posting Date: October 2, 2026
  *This role will stay open for a minimum of 3 days.