Senior Product Manager, Core Payments

Toast creates technology to help restaurants and local businesses succeed in a digital world, helping business owners operate, increase sales, engage customers, and keep employees happy.

As a Senior Product Manager on Toast’s Payments team, you will help shape the systems and infrastructure that power how money moves across the Toast platform. You will work closely with engineering, finance, operations, and processor partners to deliver reliable, scalable, and cost-efficient payment capabilities that support Toast’s growing product ecosystem.

This is a high-impact, highly cross-functional role. You’ll contribute to defining and delivering the core systems that power how Toast processes payments, and you’ll help evolve our underlying infrastructure to support scale, reliability, and cost efficiency. You’ll play a key role in our platform modernization efforts—improving settlement accuracy, resiliency, and processor readiness—and partner with engineering to ensure our systems can meet the needs of enterprise and international customers. You will also support the exploration of intelligent system enhancements, such as ML-informed retry or routing signals, to improve success rates and reduce failure loops.

About this role* (Responsibilities)

• Design and deliver new payment capabilities such as new authorization types, ML-powered retry logic, intelligent dynamic routing strategies, etc
• Define, prioritize, and deliver roadmap initiatives that improve the reliability, accuracy, and efficiency of Toast’s payment processing systems.
• Lead execution for infrastructure-focused programs such as, resiliency, system migrations, and failover capabilities
• Interpret and apply card scheme rules and processor specifications (e.g., Visa, Mastercard, Amex) to ensure scalable and compliant implementation across the platform.
• Partner closely with engineering to modernize Toast’s transaction layer — including state management, asynchronous workflows, API contracts, and observability tooling.
• Collaborate closely with finance and operations teams on settlement accuracy, reconciliation, cost modeling, and risk mitigation.
• Manage multi-team dependencies with Engineering, Processor Partners, Customer Support, FinOps, and Product Marketing.
• Collaborate with processors and partners to scope new integrations, manage certifications, and expand Toast’s global payment capabilities.
• Drive execution discipline through clear requirements, acceptance criteria, documentation, and cross-functional communication.
• Monitor key performance metrics and partner with engineering to improve system reliability and operational health.
• Communicate roadmap updates, project status, and risks to stakeholders with clarity and transparency.

What you'll need to thrive (Requirements)

• 5+ years of product management experience, focusing on payments, fintech infrastructure, or transaction orchestration.
• Proven track record shipping complex capabilities in core payment flows — such as incremental auth, refund architecture, fallback handling, and multi-gateway orchestration.
• Strong technical fluency — you understand and can work from payment specifications, network mandates, and API definitions, and collaborate deeply with engineering on architecture and design.
• Deep familiarity with card networks, processors, and the end-to-end lifecycle of a transaction, from initiation to final settlement.
• Experience navigating regional payment differences, acquiring relationships, and compliance requirements across geographies.
• Skilled at leading platform-level initiatives involving distributed systems, asynchronous workflows, and system resilience.
• A natural influencer who can align senior engineers, operations leaders, and external partners around a compelling vision and roadmap.
• Clear and compelling communicator, both written and verbal — able to translate complex systems into crisp narratives for execs, peers, and partners.
• Data- and outcome-driven, relentlessly focused on real-world impact, system metrics, and customer success.
• Excited about building globally scalable payment systems and exploring intelligent optimization techniques (ML-based retry, dynamic routing, etc.).
• A strategic, systems-level thinker who thrives in ambiguity, takes ownership, and drives clarity in complex environments

AI at Toast

At Toast, one of our company values is that we're hungry to build and learn. We believe learning new AI tools empowers us to build for our customers faster, more independently, and with higher quality. We provide these tools across all disciplines, from Engineering and Product to Sales and Support, and are inspired by how our Toasters are already driving real value with them. The people who thrive here are those who embrace changes that let us build more for our customers; it’s a core part of our culture.

Our Total Rewards Philosophy

We strive to provide competitive compensation and benefits programs that help to attract, retain, and motivate the best and brightest people in our industry. Our total rewards package goes beyond great earnings potential and provides the means to a healthy lifestyle with the flexibility to meet Toasters’ changing needs. Learn more about our benefits at https://careers.toasttab.com/toast-benefits.

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