Product Manager - Payments

Sage's Payments Platform is the trusted foundation that powers how customers move money globally. We operate two core services, — Payments In (receivables collection) and Payments Out (supplier payments, payroll, disbursements) — integrating with payment providers across every major geography and method (ACH, SEPA, Wire, Card, Real-Time Payments, and more).

Your customers are internal product teams. Your job is ensuring they can confidently embed money movement into their workflows through clean APIs, and headless consumption layers and a globally consistent provider network.

This is a critical moment. Payments are increasingly the central differentiator that unlocks cash flow, liquidity, and fintech opportunities for Sage customers. You will own the evolution of both services, ruthlessly prioritise provider integrations globally, manage competing demands from internal teams, and ensure the platform scales to handle billions in transactional volume.

*** Please note: This is a hybrid role requiring 3 days per week in our Newcastle office ***

What you’ll do:

• Lead the payment platform. Own the platform roadmap and lifecycle for Payments In and Payments Out, connecting platform choices to customer, consumer and business value.
• Discover the right problems. Regularly engage consuming Sage product teams, developers, customers and relevant commercial, support, compliance and provider partners. Combine direct evidence with platform data, market signals and regulatory insight to frame and validate problems before and during delivery.
• Own the API-first consumption experience. Set the product direction for consistent APIs, webhooks, events, SDKs, documentation, sandbox capabilities, versioning and observability. Reduce integration effort and cognitive load while keeping provider-specific complexity behind stable platform contracts.
• Prioritise for leverage. Select, sequence, reshape or stop provider integrations, payment methods and platform capabilities based on customer reach, strategic fit, evidence, risk, cost and reuse. Make assumptions, exclusions and trade-offs explicit.
• Shape work for delivery confidence. Agree the problem statement, intended outcome, essential outcome, exclusions, constraints, essential acceptance evidence and success measures. Partner with Engineering, Solution Design and Architecture so material risks are understood before commitments are made.
• Steward the provider ecosystem. Lead product alignment with payment providers on roadmaps, service levels, capability gaps, commercial value and escalation; rationalise low-value or duplicative integrations when evidence supports it.
• Navigate regulation and risk. Partner with Legal, Compliance, Risk, Security and Finance on PSD2, Open Banking, fraud and AML controls, data residency and relevant local payment regulation without fragmenting the platform unnecessarily.
• Drive adoption and migration. Build the case, enable consuming teams and lead migration from legacy payment handling. Treat integration time, reliability, adoption, support demand and realised value as product outcomes.
• Learn across the lifecycle. Monitor performance and adoption after release, compare outcomes with the original case and decide whether to improve, expand, sustain, migrate or stop.
• Lead through influence. Align Engineering, Solution Design, Architecture, consuming product teams, providers and commercial stakeholders around a clear direction; communicate decisions and trade-offs in language appropriate to technical, regulatory and business audiences.

How you’ll work and decide:

• Act AI-native, with accountable judgement. Use approved AI tools to accelerate research, synthesis, opportunity sizing, scenario analysis, signal detection, documentation and communication. Build repeatable AI-assisted workflows where they improve speed or quality, while personally verifying material sources, reasoning, calculations and claims before they enter a decision record or stakeholder communication.
• Protect trust and confidentiality. Use AI in line with security, privacy, data-handling and responsible-use requirements. Keep material product decisions traceable to verified evidence and make uncertainty visible.
• Decide within the role’s authority. Within the area’s approved investment limits, initiate, select, sequence, reshape or stop work; set intended outcomes, essential outcomes, exclusions, acceptance evidence and success measures; and explain the reasoning.
• Seek review at the right threshold. Ask for review when investment exceeds approved limits; a decision binds another area; commercial, architectural or regulatory exposure is unprecedented or high consequence; an external promise sits outside agreed limits; a mandated date may change; or the work exceeds the current approval level.
• Make evidence and trade-offs visible. Keep decision records concise and current; distinguish facts from assumptions; say no clearly; and revisit decisions when new evidence changes the case.

What you’ll bring:

• Platform product leadership. A strong record of owning API, infrastructure or integration-heavy products used by internal or external development teams, ideally in payments or financial services.
• Senior judgement. Evidence of making sound, consequential decisions amid ambiguity, balancing customer value, reliability, regulation, commercial constraints and long-term platform health.
• Customer and developer empathy. The ability to turn developer, product-team and end-customer evidence into coherent platform choices and an adoption strategy.
• Decisive prioritisation. A habit of making high-leverage bets, cutting scope, stopping low-value work and explaining trade-offs with clarity.
• Cross-functional influence. The ability to align teams with competing incentives and build commitment without relying on hierarchy.
• Multi-geography fluency. Experience navigating different regulations, payment rails, providers and market needs while protecting a coherent global platform.
• Clear communication. The ability to explain payment orchestration, platform architecture, regulatory implications, business value and adoption choices to technical and non-technical audiences.
• AI fluency with sound controls. Practical experience using AI to improve product discovery, analysis and communication, coupled with disciplined verification, confidentiality and responsible judgement.

Useful additional experience:

• Payments and fintech. Payments product management, Open Banking, embedded finance, real-time payments or API banking.
• Provider portfolios. Managing numerous third-party API integrations and making explicit trade-offs on coverage, resilience, cost, support and vendor lock-in.
• Developer experience. API and SDK adoption, documentation, sandboxes, authentication, versioning and backward compatibility.
• Distributed systems. Webhooks, idempotency, event-driven architecture, eventual consistency, reconciliation and operational observability.

What success looks like in the first 12 months:

• A trusted direction. A clear, evidence-backed strategy and roadmap for Payments In and Payments Out, with explicit choices on providers, payment methods, shared capabilities, investment and sunsetting.
• A coherent headless platform. Stable platform contracts, versioning principles and developer journeys are documented; consuming teams can understand, test and adopt capabilities without needing to master provider-specific complexity.
• Faster, easier adoption. Baselines and agreed targets exist for time to first successful sandbox transaction, production integration effort, support demand and migration progress, with measurable improvement underway.
• Growing realised value. Adoption across AP, AR, Payroll, Expense and fintech teams is measurable and growing, with value and ROI tracked rather than assumed.
• A healthier provider ecosystem. Low-value overlap is reduced, key partnerships are strengthened, and clear service-level, roadmap and escalation governance is operating.
• Trusted compliance and resilience. The regulatory and control strategy is documented and trusted; service objectives are explicit; 99.95% availability is consistently achieved or there is an agreed, evidence-backed recovery plan with visible progress.
• Meaningful platform outcomes shipped. Two or three major capabilities, provider additions or migrations have unlocked demonstrable value for consuming products.
• AI-native practice embedded. Repeatable AI-assisted workflows shorten research, synthesis and decision preparation; material outputs remain verified, secure, traceable and owned by the Product Manager.
• Lifecycle decisions are routine. Post-release evidence leads to timely improve, expand, sustain, migrate or stop decisions, with learning shared across the wider product practice.

Benefits? We have plenty...

Video:

• Generous bonuses and pension scheme: Up to 8% matched pension contribution plus 2% top-up by Sage.
• 25 days of paid annual leave with the option to buy up to another 5 days.
• 8 bank holiday days.
• Paid 5 days yearly to volunteer through our Sage Foundation.
• 50% income protection.
• Holiday buy + sell.
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage.
• Work away scheme for up to 10 weeks a year.
• Ongoing training and professional development.
• Healthy Mind app membership
• Access to various helpful memberships for finances, health and wellbeing.

#J-18808-Ljbffr