Product Lead – Office of R&D

Financial technology is a high-growth industry as change and innovation continue to disrupt the status-quo and prompt major transformation. Arcesium is at a particularly interesting time in our own growth as we look to leverage our successfully established market position and expand operations in pursuit of strategic new business opportunities. We value intellectual curiosity, proactive ownership, and collaboration with colleagues, and we empower you to meaningfully contribute from day one and accelerate your professional development.

We are looking for an exceptionally talented individual to join our Product Group as a Product Lead in the Office of R&D at one of our India offices. The Office of R&D is Arcesium's central strategic function, responsible for overseeing all firm-funded R&D initiatives while ensuring transparency, accountability, and ROI maximization.

In this role, you'll be instrumental in strategic oversight and optimization of Arcesium's growing R&D investment portfolio, ensuring our initiatives deliver maximum value and align with the firm's transformation objectives. Additionally, you'll also build scalable frameworks that enable the organization to innovate more efficiently - standardized investment prioritization processes, robust R&D progress tracking, uniform firmwide insights (townhalls, board reporting, roadmaps), and more. Most importantly, you'll create the infrastructure and systems that empower teams across Arcesium to execute on R&D initiatives at scale while maintaining strategic alignment across the organization.

What you’ll do:

• Design and implement scalable frameworks for evaluating R&D investments, while also conducting independent review & thought leadership to enable leadership to make data-driven decisions about capital allocation and strategic priorities.
• Develop and institutionalize repeatable processes for R&D governance, creating structures that enable the organization to effectively manage an expanding portfolio of initiatives while aligning with the firm's transformation objectives
• Develop and manage comprehensive program monitoring systems while actively tracking R&D initiatives, budget utilization, and milestone achievement - serving as the key liaison between Program Owners and leadership to drive visibility into progress, risks, and mitigation strategies
• Maintain the overall R&D roadmap and drive comprehensive reporting across key forums (quarterly reviews, board meetings, townhalls) - delivering standardized insights on program progress, current and projected spend, strategic impact, wins, setbacks, and more.
• Architect standardized processes for measuring and monitoring ROI across the R&D portfolio, working cross-functionally with Finance and CPD to establish consistent methodologies that enable data-driven investment decisions
• Assist in product operations; collect / analyze product usage, improve tooling and processes for product planning and execution.
• Assist with customer-facing content (roadmaps, client facing presentations) related to R&D deliverables.

What you’ll need:

• 8+ years of experience as a product manager, program manager or product operations manager
• Outstanding communication skills (written, verbal) with proven ability to influence various audiences (firm-wide, executive management) and translate complex concepts into clear, actionable insights
• Strong track record of implementing governance structures and measurement systems across complex organizations
• Strong Excel skills and a sound knowledge of Jira (or other software development tools); technical knowledge of databases and setting up analytical tools will be preferred.
• Be able to work in an environment where structure needs to be defined, and to work with multiple teams to set up new practices and processes.
• Critical thinking and the ability to articulate standpoints/ideas to influence multiple stakeholders.
• Experience working cross functionally across the organization: Technology, Product, Finance, Product Marketing, etc.
• Outstanding academic background & passion to work in a high-tech software development environment. The candidate should be able to understand and translate technology very well, into simple yet comprehensive terms for end users.

Arcesium and its affiliates do not discriminate in employment matters on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, gender identity, pregnancy, national origin, age, military service eligibility, veteran status, sexual orientation, marital status, disability, or any other category protected by law. Note that for us, this is more than just legal boilerplate. We are genuinely committed to these principles, which form an important part of our corporate culture, and are eager to hear from all qualified individuals.