Senior Product Manager - Payments Intelligence

About Cleo

At Cleo, we're not just building another fintech app. We're embarking on a mission to fundamentally change humanity's relationship with money. Imagine a world where everyone, regardless of background or income, has access to a hyper-intelligent financial advisor in their pocket. That's the future we're creating.

Cleo is a rare success story: a profitable, fast-growing unicorn with over $200 million in ARR and growing over 2x year-over-year. This isn't just a job; it's a chance to join a team of brilliant, driven individuals who are passionate about making a real difference. We have an exceptionally high bar for talent, seeking individuals who are not only at the top of their field but also embody our culture of collaboration and positive impact.

If you’re driven by complex challenges that push your expertise, the chance to shape something truly transformative, and the potential to share in Cleo’s success as we scale, while growing alongside a company that’s scaling fast, this might be your perfect fit.

Follow us on LinkedIn to keep up to date with new product features and insights from the team.

The Role: As Cleo’s Senior Product Manager for Payments Intelligence, you will take ownership of the payment systems that optimise how and when we take payments to balance revenue and costs, while preserving customer trust. This pivotal role is central to reducing payment arrears and minimising involuntary churn while keeping Cost of Goods Sold under control, ensuring that our users can continuously access Cleo's features without disruption. You will work closely with a cross functional team including Engineers, ML engineers and Analytics to enhance our Payments Systems including Payments Decision Engine (PDE) and lead strategic initiatives that effectively balance user trust, revenue impact, and cost efficiency.

What You’ll Do:

• Strategic Leadership: Direct the end-to-end repayments strategy, designing and refining payment flows to boost success rates while maintaining a seamless customer experience and keeping COGS under control.
• Problem Resolution: Address high-stakes challenges by developing intelligent retry logic and recovery workflows, thus safeguarding revenue and preventing customer alienation.
• Commercial Insight: Conduct detailed analyses of payment success rates, processing fees, and cost trade-offs to optimize Cleo’s payment architecture and methods.
• Regulatory Navigation: Guarantee compliance with complex US payment regulations, including NACHA rules and card network policies.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with teams across ML, engineering, analytics, compliance, commercial and customer support to scale systems that handle millions of transactions daily.
• User Advocacy: Combine empathy and pragmatism to create transparent payment processes that align with customer expectations and enhance trust.

About You:

• ML Acumen: Demonstrated experience collaborating with ML teams to optimise decision engines, translating business objectives into ML-driven outcomes.
• Consumer Product Insight: Proven background in dynamic consumer-focused product companies, with a strong sense of how to align customer needs with business impacts. Experience in fintech or subscription-based models is a plus.
• Execution: Experience launching complex payment systems and crafting long-term experimentation plans.
• Data Proficiency: You’re deeply familiar with success rate metics, COGS, and LTV, with the expertise to influence them positively.
• Technical and Regulatory Knowledge: Comfort discussing technical details such as APIs, retry logic, and the strategic reasoning behind US payment regulations.

Bonus Points

• You’ve got expertise in US Payments: Deep understanding of US payment mechanisms, including ACH, recurring payments, card-on-file systems and experience with open banking payments is also a plus, along with familiarity with major payment processors.

Why Join Cleo?

• Impact at Scale: Take charge of a crucial system that is integral to Cleo’s scaling efforts, directly affecting our users' financial health.
• Innovative Environment: Collaborate with engineers, analysts and ML engineers to develop sophisticated, adaptive systems.
• Visibility and Influence: Work closely with executive leaders on mission-critical initiatives, ensuring significant contributions are visible and impactful.

What do you get for all your hard work?

• A competitive compensation package (base + equity) with bi-annual reviews, aligned to our quarterly OKR planning cycles. You can view our public progression framework and salary bandings here: https://cleo-ai.progressionapp.com/ (this role is PM3 level and we can pay up to £102,500)
• Work at one of the fastest-growing tech startups, backed by top VC firms, Balderton & EQT Ventures
• A clear progression plan. We want you to keep growing. That means trying new things, leading others, challenging the status quo and owning your impact. Always with our complete support. 
• Flexibility. We can’t fight for the world’s financial health if we’re not healthy ourselves. We work with everyone to make sure they have the balance they need to do their best work
• Work where you work best. We’re a globally distributed team. If you live in London we have a hybrid approach, we’d love you to spend one day a week or more in our beautiful office. If you’re outside of London, we’ll encourage you to spend a couple of days with us a few times per year. And we’ll cover your travel costs, naturally.
• Other benefits;
• Company-wide performance reviews every 6 months 
• Generous pay increases for high-performing team members
• Equity top-ups for team members getting promoted
• 25 days annual leave a year + public holidays (+ an additional day for every year you spend at Cleo, up to 30 days)
• 6% employer-matched pension in the UK
• Private Medical Insurance via Vitality, dental cover, and life assurance
• Enhanced parental leave
• 1 month paid sabbatical after 4 years at Cleo
• Regular socials and activities, online and in-person
• We'll pay for your OpenAI subscription
• Online mental health support via Spill
• Workplace Nursery Scheme 
• And many more!

We strongly encourage applications from people of colour, the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities, neurodivergent people, parents, carers, and people from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

If there’s anything we can do to accommodate your specific situation, please let us know.

UK App access: The Cleo app is no longer downloadable in the UK (but only until next year). If you’re an existing user, you’ll still have access to the app. But some features won’t be available (just for a little while). Why? 99% of our users are based in the US – where financial health is often overlooked. We’ve decided to shift our focus to where we can provide the most value and make the greatest impact for users who need it most. Then we’ll be able to apply what we learn to better support our UK users in the future.