Back to jobs

Senior Platform Product Manager

Remote (US), Richmond, VA or Arlington, VA

At Koalafi, we believe in a world where no one has to put an important purchase on hold. That’s why we’re making it easier for more people to pay for big purchases over time.

Retailers across the country rely on us to offer flexible lease-to-own financing to their non-prime consumers, while increasing sales and strengthening customer loyalty. Their 2M+ customers love us because we provide a flexible way for them to make payments and give them an opportunity to improve their credit. Our 200+ Koalafi teammates enjoy inspiring and challenging work that accelerates their careers.

Interested in learning more about how we’re transforming the financing experience and joining our team?

About The Role

At Koalafi, we partner with merchants to offer flexible lease-to-own financing to consumers, helping merchants increase sales while giving customers more ways to pay over time. Every product experience we ship, for consumers, merchants, and internal teams, is built on a shared technical foundation that must be reliable, scalable, and easy to build on.

We're looking for a Senior Platform Product Manager to own those capabilities. In this role, you'll lead the Shared Tech team, a cross-cutting engineering group responsible for the event bus, communications gateway, and key modernization initiatives that other product teams build on. Your work won't always be visible to end users, but it will be felt across every team and product at Koalafi.

This is the right role for a systems-minded product manager who thrives when solving hard platform and infrastructure problems, where shared services, developer experience, data foundations, and reliability must work together at scale. You have enough technical fluency to partner closely with engineers and data teams, and know how to translate organizational needs into clear platform capabilities. You’ll align cross-functional stakeholders on a strategy that makes every product team at Koalafi faster and more confident in what they ship.

This individual contributor role reports directly to the Senior Director of Product. You will partner tightly with the Shared Tech Lead and collaborate across every product and engineering team at Koalafi.

What You’ll Do

Own and drive the roadmap for the Shared Tech platform

  • Lead prioritization and facilitate thoughtful tradeoffs with engineering and product stakeholders, balancing developer velocity, reliability, and long-term platform health
  • Align engineering leads and product teams on what platform investments matter most and why
  • Lead ongoing discovery with internal engineering teams to surface needs, blockers, and gaps, then translate them into cohesive, reusable platform capabilities

Lead delivery as the embedded product manager for the Shared Tech engineering team

  • Partner continuously with engineering to define the what and the why, while empowering the team to determine the how
  • Maintain a prioritized backlog with crisp epics and stories, clear acceptance criteria, and measurable outcomes
  • Define success metrics and measurement plans

Shape the platform to enable every product team to build faster and more reliably

  • Event Bus - own the strategy and roadmap for Koalafi's internal event infrastructure; ensure it is reliable, well-documented, and easy for product teams to adopt and extend
  • Communications Gateway - own the platform that routes and delivers consumer and merchant communications across channels; ensure it is scalable, auditable, and supports the needs of product teams without requiring bespoke solutions
  • Modernization Priorities - partner with engineering to identify, scope, and sequence the highest-impact investments in platform modernization; create the clarity needed for teams to migrate off legacy systems safely and incrementally
  • Drive operational excellence by treating performance, reliability, observability, and auditability as foundational requirements

How You’ll Work

  • Partner closely with the Shared Tech Lead to set direction, make tradeoffs, and deliver high-quality platform improvements
  • Conduct ongoing discovery with internal engineering and product teams to understand pain points, integration needs, and unmet gaps
  • Collaborate with teams across Consumer, Merchant, Credit, and Operations to understand how shared platform capabilities support their roadmaps and where they fall short
  • Partner with Security and Compliance to ensure platform services meet the company's regulatory and security requirements
  • Build internal communication practices around platform changes, adoption guides, migration timelines, and deprecation notices, so teams can plan around platform evolution

About You

  • 5+ years of product management experience with a focus on building and shipping technical, platform, or shared-services products
  • Strong systems thinker with enough technical fluency to earn engineers' trust, translate their needs into a roadmap, and make sound tradeoffs between short-term wins and long-term platform health
  • Demonstrated ability to lead and influence cross-functional teams toward a common goal without direct authority, with excellent written and verbal communication across technical and non-technical audiences
  • Comfortable operating in ambiguous environments - able to create structure, clarity, and momentum where none exists
  • Experience using data and instrumentation to inform prioritization and evaluate the success of platform investments
  • Strong passion for AI and LLMs and their potential to unlock efficiencies; actively follows the space and brings a point of view on where these technologies can create meaningful leverage in platform products and internal workflows

Preferred Qualifications

  • Experience in fintech, lending, or regulated-industry engineering environments
  • Familiarity with observability tooling, data infrastructure, or API platform work
  • Exposure to developer experience programs, internal developer portals, or platform engineering practices
  • Background working with or alongside Security and Compliance in a financial services context

Location: Richmond, VA; Arlington, VA; or Remote (U.S.). Associates near one of our office locations may work in-office, hybrid, or remotely. Remote opportunities are available to candidates throughout the United States.

Salary Range: $137,000-$185,000 per year (depending on experience and location)
Additional Compensation: This position may be eligible to participate in company bonus plan. 

The final salary offer will depend on factors including, but not limited to, experience, skills, and geographic location. The actual annualized salary amount offered to any candidate at the time of hire will be reflected solely in the candidate’s offer letter.

Applications will be accepted until position is filled.

Why choose Koalafi: A career at Koalafi means opportunities to tackle exciting challenges every single day. We take pride in a culture of innovation, trust, and ownership. You'll get outside your comfort zone, build meaningful relationships, and most of all, take charge of projects that ultimately help people get the things they need most.

Benefits:

At Koalafi, you will have a direct impact on our products and help shape the company’s success. We offer competitive compensation & benefits packages to keep you at your best:

  • Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage
  • 20 PTO days + 11 paid holidays
  • 401(k) retirement with company matching
  • Student Loan & Tuition Reimbursement 
  • Commuter assistance
  • Parental leave (maternal + paternal)
  • Inclusion and Associate Engagement Programs

Who we are & what we value: 

  • We focus on what’s most important
  • We set clear expectations and deliver
  • We embrace challenges to reach our full potential
  • We ask, “How can this be better?”
  • We move fast together

Create a Job Alert

Interested in building your career at Koalafi? Get future opportunities sent straight to your email.

Apply for this job

*

indicates a required field

Resume/CV*

Accepted file types: pdf, doc, docx, txt, rtf

Education

Select...
Select...
Select...
Select...
Please indicate your preferred office location: *
Select...
Select...
Select...

Voluntary Self-Identification

For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey. Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiring process or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential file.

As set forth in Koalafi’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

Select...
Select...
Race & Ethnicity Definitions

If you believe you belong to any of the categories of protected veterans listed below, please indicate by making the appropriate selection. As a government contractor subject to the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA), we request this information in order to measure the effectiveness of the outreach and positive recruitment efforts we undertake pursuant to VEVRAA. Classification of protected categories is as follows:

A "disabled veteran" is one of the following: a veteran of the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service who is entitled to compensation (or who but for the receipt of military retired pay would be entitled to compensation) under laws administered by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs; or a person who was discharged or released from active duty because of a service-connected disability.

A "recently separated veteran" means any veteran during the three-year period beginning on the date of such veteran's discharge or release from active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval, or air service.

An "active duty wartime or campaign badge veteran" means a veteran who served on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service during a war, or in a campaign or expedition for which a campaign badge has been authorized under the laws administered by the Department of Defense.

An "Armed forces service medal veteran" means a veteran who, while serving on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service, participated in a United States military operation for which an Armed Forces service medal was awarded pursuant to Executive Order 12985.

Select...

Voluntary Self-Identification of Disability

Form CC-305
Page 1 of 1
OMB Control Number 1250-0005
Expires 04/30/2026

Why are you being asked to complete this form?

We are a federal contractor or subcontractor. The law requires us to provide equal employment opportunity to qualified people with disabilities. We have a goal of having at least 7% of our workers as people with disabilities. The law says we must measure our progress towards this goal. To do this, we must ask applicants and employees if they have a disability or have ever had one. People can become disabled, so we need to ask this question at least every five years.

Completing this form is voluntary, and we hope that you will choose to do so. Your answer is confidential. No one who makes hiring decisions will see it. Your decision to complete the form and your answer will not harm you in any way. If you want to learn more about the law or this form, visit the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) website at www.dol.gov/ofccp.

How do you know if you have a disability?

A disability is a condition that substantially limits one or more of your “major life activities.” If you have or have ever had such a condition, you are a person with a disability. Disabilities include, but are not limited to:

  • Alcohol or other substance use disorder (not currently using drugs illegally)
  • Autoimmune disorder, for example, lupus, fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, HIV/AIDS
  • Blind or low vision
  • Cancer (past or present)
  • Cardiovascular or heart disease
  • Celiac disease
  • Cerebral palsy
  • Deaf or serious difficulty hearing
  • Diabetes
  • Disfigurement, for example, disfigurement caused by burns, wounds, accidents, or congenital disorders
  • Epilepsy or other seizure disorder
  • Gastrointestinal disorders, for example, Crohn's Disease, irritable bowel syndrome
  • Intellectual or developmental disability
  • Mental health conditions, for example, depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorder, schizophrenia, PTSD
  • Missing limbs or partially missing limbs
  • Mobility impairment, benefiting from the use of a wheelchair, scooter, walker, leg brace(s) and/or other supports
  • Nervous system condition, for example, migraine headaches, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis (MS)
  • Neurodivergence, for example, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorder, dyslexia, dyspraxia, other learning disabilities
  • Partial or complete paralysis (any cause)
  • Pulmonary or respiratory conditions, for example, tuberculosis, asthma, emphysema
  • Short stature (dwarfism)
  • Traumatic brain injury
Select...

PUBLIC BURDEN STATEMENT: According to the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 no persons are required to respond to a collection of information unless such collection displays a valid OMB control number. This survey should take about 5 minutes to complete.