Staff Product Manager, Payments Orchestration & Intelligence

Lightspark is building the open payment protocol for the Internet making money move like data: instantly, globally, and without friction. With enterprise tools like Grid, Node, and Spark, businesses can send and receive money instantly, securely, and at a fraction of the cost, anytime, anywhere. Lightspark is headquartered in Los Angeles, California, but serves the world. As the Staff Product Manager for Payments Orchestration & Intelligence, you will be the architect of Lightspark’s core transaction engine. You will own the strategy for our AI Routing and Grid Switch, determining how money is routed across disparate global financial networks and domestic real-time rails (RTP) to maximize success and minimize cost. This is a unique, matrixed role: you will drive the horizontal platform layer that scales our infrastructure while simultaneously leading vertical, end-to-end customer engagements that bring new payment capabilities to market. We are looking for a high-leverage builder who thrives in a fast-paced "0 to 1" environment and is eager to define the future of agentic commerce. WHAT YOU’LL BE DOING Lead Payment Orchestration: Define the roadmap for our AI Router and Grid Switch, building the intelligent pathfinding logic that optimizes for transaction success rates (TSR), latency, and cost. Scale Global Connectivity: Drive the expansion into domestic payment rails (e.g., SPEI, UPI, SEPA) and manage the technical and regulatory complexities of global interoperability. Own the "Closed Loop": Design the strategy for internal and customer-facing observability dashboards and automated reconciliation workflows to ensure institutional-grade financial integrity. Drive Vertical Innovation: Lead high-value customer engagements from initial scoping to deployment, owning the end-to-end delivery of feature sets like P2P/B2B payments and regional pay-in solutions. Negotiate Network Resilience: Partner with Business Development to engage with financial partners, negotiating limits and unlocking new feature expansions to ensure a robust, high-performance network. Future-Proof the Stack: Collaborate with Engineering to influence long-term architecture that supports emerging use cases, including Agentic Commerce and LLM-driven transaction flows. Maximize Impact with AI: Leverage AI and automation to accelerate product development lifecycles and enhance the efficiency of our ledger and routing capabilities. WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR Deep Payment Expertise: 7+ years of experience in global payment infrastructure. You have "under-the-hood" knowledge of funds flows and understand exactly how domestic rails settle. Technical & Strategic Fluency: You are equally comfortable collaborating with engineers on backend system architecture as you are navigating complex partner negotiations with Business Development. The "0 to 1" Mindset: You have a proven track record of bringing clarity to ambiguous environments and building scalable B2B solutions from scratch. AI-Native Builder: You effectively use AI tools to amplify your impact and possess a genuine curiosity for how rapidly changing technologies can be integrated into payment systems. Grit & Adaptability: You thrive in fast-paced startup environments and are ready to "roll up your sleeves" to solve detailed money movement challenges at scale. Systems Thinking: You obsess over edge cases, failure scenarios, and performance benchmarks (SLAs), ensuring our platform remains resilient under enterprise-grade volume. Preferred: Familiarity with digital assets, the Lightning Network, or programmable money. Lightspark is on a mission to build an open payment protocol for the Internet at scale and therefore we’re committed to creating a more inclusive and diverse workplace to reflect the customers we serve. We welcome interest from individuals of all backgrounds and levels of experience who share our mission. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. We will consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with the