Product Manager, Payment Messaging - Very Good Security (VGS)

About VGS

VGS is building the trust infrastructure for a new era of commerce. As commerce becomes agentic, payments are increasing dramatically in volume, speed, and complexity, and the companies driving that shift need a foundation they can fully trust.

That's where VGS comes in. We're the world's leader in payment tokenization, trusted by the most innovative AI and Fortune 500 companies, merchants, banks, and fintechs to power modern payments and agentic commerce. We store more than 9 billion tokens and process more than 10 billion monthly interactions, touching a third of all e-commerce. That scale isn't incidental. It's why leading companies embed our universal token vault and credential management platform directly into their stack, taming the complexity of payment data so they can move faster.

About the Role

We are seeking a Product Manager to help drive the evolution of our payments & banking technology. This is a role for a high-agency leader who thrives on technical complexity and demands perfection from their systems. You won't just build features; you will envision new ways of looking at decades-old problems, manage sophisticated relationships and product enhancements with industry experts, and help create the technical foundation on top of which the payments world is built.

In this role, you will work across the payments and banking industry to deliver products in the service of technologists on both sides of the network. This includes creating products in the realm of payments messaging, processor integration management, legacy system modernization, security, and compliance.

What You’ll Do

• Product Strategy & Discovery: Meet with banks, processors, customers, partners, and engineering leaders to map complex technical problems to business needs. Define technical requirements, prioritize features, and create roadmaps that align with business objectives.
• Manage complex implementation rollouts that span multiple continents to modernize banking, acquiring, and similar use-cases.
• Ideate a sophisticated and configurable developer-friendly product interface that supports payments technologists, customer implementation specialists, and business stakeholders. This interface will be used to interpret ISO8583, ISO20022, and similar messaging formats over a wide array of protocols.
• Understand, integrate with, and build on top of pre-existing products, platforms, and concepts within the VGS ecosystem.

What You Bring

• Experience: 10+ years of experience in payments technology as a software engineer, product manager, or related functions. Must have experience launching new initiatives involving API design, O11y, private networking, and enterprise authentication systems.
• Deep experience working in banking and/or payments gateways, interacting directly with networks or acquirer/issuer processors. Experience with AS/400 servers, ISO8583, ISO20022, and similar technologies is required.
• T-Shaped Technical Mastery: Broad proficiency across the payments ecosystem, including DUKPT encryption for terminal/ATM messages, EBCDIC encoding, ISO8583 messaging, observability, and modern software development.
• Technical Conviction: Strong, well-founded opinions on software architecture. Willing to advocate for systems operationalized via configuration by implementation/product teams.
• Communication Skills: Strong written, verbal, and visual communication skills for technical documentation, RFC presentations, and cross-functional leadership.

Mindset:

• Born Inventor: Love for designing and building systems from scratch.
• Abstract Problem Solver: Ability to break down complex sets into conceptual building blocks.
• Technical Optimism: Energized by integrating with legacy systems and solving difficult modernization challenges.