Product

What is Spade?

Financial institutions process billions of transactions every day across cards, ACH, wires, and third party aggregators. But most of that data is difficult to use. Descriptions are inconsistent, merchant names don’t match, and categories vary by payment type.

Spade’s API takes these raw, messy transactions, and in <50 ms, returns clean, structured records linked to verified businesses in our proprietary database. Building on that foundation, our agent layer leverages this enriched data to automate insights and decision-making. Customers including Stripe, FIS, Bilt, Citizens, and Mercury use Spade to authorize more transactions, personalize experiences, power rewards programs, and more. We lead the market in merchant coverage, speed of enrichment, and data accuracy, enriching hundreds of billions of dollars in transaction volume every month.

Spade is a fast growing, Series A company backed by industry experts and top tier investors (including a16z, Flourish Ventures, Y-Combinator, and Gradient Ventures). We’re a lean and execution-oriented hybrid team, passionate about building exceptional products for our growing customer base. We care deeply about diversity of background, experience, and opinion. We value empathy, curiosity, and passion, and strive to create an environment where individuals have autonomy and the ability to take ownership over their work.

What will you be doing?

Spade is looking for our first product hire to be a driving force behind our mission to make transaction data clean, structured, and actionable for financial institutions. In this role, you won't just manage a product, you'll own and shape core features of our platform and partner on our overall product strategy. As our first dedicated product hire, you'll partner closely with the CEO, sales, data science and engineering to define what we build and why. You will:

• Translate vision into a defensible product roadmap by synthesizing customer insights, market signals, and business goals
• Act as a strategic partner to the CEO and leadership team, shaping market positioning, competitive differentiation, and long-term platform bets
• Partner with sales and customers to extract signal from wins, losses, and conversations, and turn it into product direction
• Drive alignment across engineering, sales, and leadership on priorities, trade-offs, and sequencing
• Set design and UX standards as Spade moves from API-only to a full platform
• Establish success metrics that hold the product accountable to outcomes, not outputs, using research, usage data, and market analysis to inform decisions
• Build the product function at Spade — processes, frameworks, and standards that scale as the team grows

What experience, skills, and qualifications are necessary?

• Must have:
• 5-9+ years of product management experience at a high-growth B2B startup
• Based in NYC
• Proven track record of building or launching products end-to-end, from early ideation through delivery and iteration
• Background in fintech or payments — you understand the key players, regulatory landscape, and nuances of building financial products
• Strong technical fluency — you can partner effectively with engineers, understand API-first products, and make informed trade-off decisions
• Exceptional communicator — you can make complex ideas feel simple for both technical and non-technical audiences
• Comfortable being the first and building a playbook
• Interest in leveraging AI to accelerate execution
• Nice to have:
• Experience with transaction or payments data
• Familiarity with developer-facing or API-first products
• Prior experience working directly with a founder or CEO on product strategy
• Experience at a Seed –Series C fintech or financial infrastructure company
• Prior experience as the first or only Product hire at a company

Why join Spade? 

• Be a cultural founder. As an early employee, you’ll play a meaningful role in defining and building our culture. 
• Get in on the ground floor. We’re a small but well-funded team – joining now comes with limited risk and unlimited upside. 
• Build the next generation of financial infrastructure. The future of finance will be built on better data, and Spade powers that. You’ll have the opportunity to drive impact at scale, helping industry leaders build more innovative products and services for consumers.

Benefits include:

• Competitive compensation and equity package
• Full medical, dental, and vision benefits for US-based employees
• Life & short-term disability insurance
• Unlimited PTO
• Early exercise program
• Extended post-termination exercise period
• 401K for retirement planning
• Hybrid team, with pet-friendly headquarters in NYC
• Paid parental leave
• Work from home stipend

Diversity & Inclusion at Spade:

Spade is an equal opportunity employer, committed to building a culture that is diverse, equitable, and inclusive. We believe that having people with different backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and perspectives not only helps us build the best products for our customers, but also helps us be the best version of ourselves.

Salary Range:

• At Spade, we view total compensation as consisting of salary + equity + benefits. We recruit motivated and high performing talent, and work to compensate people in line with the value they bring to our team. 
• We aim to pay fairly and competitively, and consider a number of factors in developing compensation offers. These factors include years and breadth of experience, interview performance, market dynamics, and internal equity. 
• The anticipated base salary range for this role is between $180,000 and $275,000 (depending on level), and an equity grant.