## **ABOUT KARAT**
Karat started by building corporate cards and banking accounts for creators, the people you follow on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Twitch who run real businesses but were treated as an edge case by most financial providers. The same products fit a much wider set of businesses, and today we serve creators alongside the agencies, studios and growing companies that run the same way.
We've raised $70 million from Signal Fire, Union Square Ventures, Y Combinator, CRV and Coatue, alongside CEOs from YouTube, Twitter and Wealthfront and Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin. Our team comes from Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, earlier startups and the creator world itself, and we're headquartered in Los Angeles.
We decide who gets a card and how much credit, we hold customers' deposits, and we move their money. Every one of those decisions runs through a product, an internal tool, or a person on our operations team, and the product thinking behind them is what this role owns.
## **ABOUT THE ROLE**
We're hiring a product manager to own the product thinking for the operational core of Karat: how a business applies, how we decide, and the internal tools our operations, compliance, and support teams use to review, approve, and serve customers. Your job is to make sure that by the time an engineer picks something up, the problem is framed, the edge cases are known, the design is reviewed, and operations and compliance have had their say.
The work spans both sides of the product. Internally, the tooling and automation that let a small operations team handle more volume with better decisions. Externally, the application and the card products people land on, including what happens when someone doesn't qualify for the one they wanted.
This is a builder PM role. You'll write the PRD, and you'll also build the clickable prototype before the design review, pull your own data, read the session recordings, and ship small things yourself with AI tools when waiting for an engineer would be slower than doing it. You'll work directly with the executive leadership team and with a small engineering team that moves fast and expects the thinking to be done when they pick something up.
## **WHAT YOU'LL DO**
* Own the product thinking end to end for your area: the problem statement, the PRD, the edge cases, the design review, and the launch, so that engineering picks up work that's ready to build.
* Run discovery with the people who do the work. Sit with operations and compliance while they review applications, read the support threads, watch the session recordings, and turn recurring friction into a ranked list: the few fixes that remove most of the pain.
* Prototype before you brief. Build clickable prototypes and working slices with AI tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Lovable, v0, or whatever you reach for) so reviews start from something real instead of a paragraph.
* Pull your own data. Write the SQL, define the metric before the feature ships, and report the result after.
* Put AI into operational workflows carefully: where automation should recommend and where it should decide, what the evals are, how an operator overrides it, and what gets logged.
* Prioritize from first principles. Inputs come from customers, partners, operations, and leadership; the roadmap comes from what moves throughput, risk, and customer trust. You'll say no clearly and in writing.
* Keep the loop with engineering tight: scope, sequence, cut, and unblock, so a two-week project takes two weeks.
* Hold internal tools to the same bar as customer-facing ones. The people using them all day deserve it, and it's where the throughput is.
* Write things down. Decisions, tradeoffs, and what we learned, in a form that engineers, operations, and the exec team can act on without a meeting.
## **WHAT YOU'LL NEED**
* 4+ years in product management, or the equivalent as a founder or an engineer who owned the product decisions, at a company where there was nobody to hand the hard parts to.
* You build. You've shipped prototypes or small features with AI coding tools, you can read code and a database schema, and you write SQL to answer your own questions. We'll ask you to show us something you made.
* Fintech or finance experience: lending, underwriting, payments, banking, or another regulated product where "ship it and see" has limits, and you know where they are.
* Operator empathy. You've built for internal users doing high-stakes work (operations, compliance, support) and treated them as customers.
* Discovery rigor. You define the problem and the success metric before the spec, and you can point to a time your discovery changed what got built.
* Judgment under ambiguity. You decide what's now, next, and never, and you change course when the evidence does.
* Clear writing. PRDs, decision memos, and launch notes that people read without being asked twice.
* Design taste. You can sketch the flow, critique a mock, and tell the difference between done and good.
* Based in Los Angeles, or willing to relocate.
## **NICE TO HAVE**
* You've shipped or evaluated an AI feature in production: prompts, evals, override paths, and what happened when it was wrong.
* You've worked on KYC/KYB, underwriting, credit decisioning, or risk operations.
* You were a founder, or the first PM somewhere.
* You've used session replay (LogRocket or similar), Linear, and Figma as daily tools.
## **WHY KARAT?**
* **Huge opportunity.** Creators, agencies, studios, and the growing companies that run like them are a huge market that most financial providers still treat as an edge case. We've built the products; now we're scaling them. It's our race to lose.
* **Fascinating problems.** Deciding who gets credit, how much, and how fast, with real money and real risk on both sides, for businesses most banks don't know how to read. The tools and the automation that make those decisions fast and fair are yours to design.
* **You set the defaults.** There's no product org to inherit. How discovery, specs, and launches work at Karat will be the way you set them up, and the first thing you ship will be used by your own teammates the next morning.
* **The right team.** Previous founders, operators from banking and payments, and engineers who've shipped at top companies, all hands-on. Small enough that you'll know everyone's work and everyone will know yours.
* **Culture.** Own your stuff, get stuff done, make stuff better. We hire high-agency people who come in to improve Karat, not maintain it. If you've been waiting for permission somewhere else, you won't need it here.
* **Resources and growth.** We're well capitalized and we keep the team lean, so this is a rare seat. You'll learn a lot, build foundational products, and grow as the company scales.
Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.
