Principal Product Manager - Payment Screening

The Role

We are hiring a Principal Product Manager to own the Payment Screening product area within our Risk Applications tribe. This is a senior individual contributor role with genuine commercial accountability: you are responsible for business outcomes in your domain, not just delivery.

Payment screening is a core compliance capability: financial and other institutions are required to screen payments for regulatory and compliance risk in real time before processing. The market is mature, the requirements are well understood, and the competitive landscape is established. ComplyAdvantage has an existing customer base for screening and has recently released a new version of its payment screening product, running on its highly scalable, resilient and AI-native Mesh platform. The PPM will likely pick up this latest version just as it hits the market, with pent-up demand for additional features from the commercial organisation and a migration path to manage for customers currently on the legacy screening platform.

This is a growth and scaling role, not a greenfield build. A modern and highly capable version of the product is already out. The job is to figure out what comes next: which features unlock the most commercial value, how to manage the migration of existing screening customers onto the new platform, and how to make the product competitive against established vendors while demand from the field is immediate and specific. If you have experience taking a product from its first release through rapid iteration into a market-competitive position, this role will make sense to you.

You will work within a dedicated squad alongside an engineering manager and engineers. As PPM, you are the senior partner on product decisions in that squad: you own the customer requirements, the competitive context and the commercial logic. Your engineering counterpart owns architecture, sizing and implementation. You work as peers, but in Risk Apps the PPM sets the product specification.

You will operate within a structured product operating model with clear decision rights. The CPTO sets product vision; the Product Director builds the tribe-level roadmap; you translate your product area into executable plans with trackable returns. Each squad represents a significant engineering investment, and you are expected to think about your product decisions in those terms: balancing the level of investment required against the commercial returns on specific product choices. If you have worked in organisations where product management is disciplined and commercially accountable, this will feel familiar. If you are looking for a role with full strategic autonomy and no governance framework, this is not the right fit.

What You Will Do

Own payment screening as a product area with a GM mindset. Understand the competitive landscape, know the buyer, and be accountable for whether the product is working commercially. Payment screening is a capability that every compliance platform must offer; the competitive differentiation comes from accuracy, speed, integration quality and the ability to reduce false positives using ComplyAdvantage's proprietary data. Your job is to ensure the product is competitive on all of these dimensions.

Plot the path from first release to market leadership. A modern, highly capable version of the product is in market. The immediate challenge is threefold: determine which features unlock the most commercial value and build them fast, manage the migration of existing customers from the legacy screening platform onto Mesh, and handle the pent-up demand from the commercial organisation without making commitments you cannot keep. You need to balance rapid iteration against sustainable engineering quality, and short-term commercial pressure against the medium-term product roadmap.

Understand the screening domain. Payment screening in regulated financial services has specific requirements: real-time decisioning at transaction speed, sanctions list coverage and currency, configurable matching logic, audit trails, regulatory defensibility, and integration with payment rails and core banking systems. You need enough domain depth to engage credibly with compliance buyers and to write requirements that reflect how screening actually works in production at scale.

Work directly with customers and prospects. You will be the product voice in payment screening conversations with the field, working with Solutions Consulting, Customer Success and Sales. Screening is a competitive market and buyers compare closely. You are expected to engage with enterprise compliance teams on their terms, understand their evaluation criteria, and ensure the product can win against established competitors. You will also be the product lead on migration conversations with existing screening customers moving from the legacy platform. Customer-facing commitments with dates require CPTO sign-off.

Drive requirements through a clear planning process. We work in six-week blocks. The document flow runs Plan of Record to PRD to product requirements to implementation, with quality gates at each stage. You will own PRDs for payment screening capabilities and draft requirements using AI-assisted workflows, refining them jointly with your EM.

Manage cross-tribe dependencies. Payment screening depends on capabilities in our Data tribe (sanctions data, PEP data, entity resolution, matching algorithms) and Platform tribe (real-time processing, API surface). Requirements originating in your product area cascade to those tribes as derived requirements through the formal planning process. You need enough technical understanding to write requirements that are realistic and to engage constructively with engineering in those tribes.

Use AI in your own work. We expect PPMs to use AI-assisted workflows for requirements generation, competitive analysis and document production. This is how we work, not something we aspire to.

What We Are Looking For

Essential:

• 8+ years in product management, with at least 3 years in senior IC roles owning complex B2B SaaS products in financial services, payments or adjacent regulated industries
• Direct experience with payment screening, sanctions screening, transaction filtering or closely related compliance products. This is a domain hire: the screening market is specific and competitive, and we need someone who understands how it works
• Proven ability to take a product from its initial release through rapid iteration to market competitiveness, managing competing demands from commercial, engineering and customers simultaneously
• Experience managing customer migrations between platform generations without losing customers or trust
• Commercial credibility with enterprise compliance buyers: you have engaged directly with customers, understood their screening requirements, and turned that into product decisions that drove revenue
• Strong technical understanding of real-time screening, matching logic, list management and API integration, sufficient to write requirements engineering can build from
• Demonstrable AI adoption in your own working practice: not "interested in AI" but already using it to work differently
• Experience operating within a structured product organisation where strategic direction was set above you, and delivering excellent outcomes within that framework

Preferred:

• Experience with sanctions, PEP and adverse media screening products specifically, including familiarity with the major vendors and competitive dynamics
• Understanding of the regulatory context for payment screening (OFAC, EU sanctions regulations, UK sanctions regime, SWIFT messaging standards)
• Experience managing legacy-to-modern platform migrations for enterprise customers, including the commercial and relationship management dimensions
• Comfortable in a distributed team environment across multiple locations

What Success Looks Like

At 60 days: You understand the payment screening product, the competitive landscape, the customer requirements, the current state of the Mesh release, the migration backlog and how the operating model works. You have built relationships with your squad, the Product Director, Solutions Consulting and key commercial stakeholders. You have a clear view of what the next release needs to contain and a credible plan for managing the migration alongside new feature delivery.

At 4 months: The product is iterating. Priority features identified from commercial demand are in development or released. Early migration customers are moving to the new platform. Requirements are clear, your squad trusts your product judgement, and commercial stakeholders can see progress. You are managing the tension between migration work and new feature development without letting either stall.

At 8 months: Payment screening on Mesh is the primary platform for new and migrating customers. The product is commercially competitive, feature gaps against established competitors are closing, and the migration path is well established. You are the recognised domain authority on screening within the company, trusted by commercial, respected by engineering, and contributing to the broader Risk Apps strategy.

What’s in it for you?

• Competitive salary aligned to your skills and experience 
• Unlimited Time Off Policy- A work-life balance and focus on our well-being are critical to keeping us performing at our best 
• We embrace a hybrid approach that requires employees to be in the office for two days a week. We strongly believe that this approach fosters collaboration and enables the building of meaningful relationships
• Opportunity to work on innovative projects with smart-minded people keen to share their knowledge and continuously improve 
• Annual learning budget to drive your performance and career development  
• Company Pension Scheme 
• Company Health Care Plan 
• Travel - season ticket loan 
• Cycle to work scheme with Evans Cycles