Astra
Product Lead, Platform
2mo ago
170000 –240000 USD / yearUSALeadRemoteapi designplatform managementdeveloper experiencefinancial compliance
Staff-level Product Lead to own Astra's platform layer APIs, developer experience, and foundational infrastructure products.
Responsibilities
- We're looking for a Staff-level Product Lead to own Astra's platform layer – the APIs, developer experience, control plane, and foundational infrastructure products that sit above the rails and make Astra the Payments Cloud rather than just a payments gateway. This is an IC role with principal-level scope: you'll shape the architecture of how customers interact with Astra, how they configure and extend the platform, and how Astra scales to serve increasingly sophisticated builders.
- You'll work directly with the Leadership Team and partner deeply with engineering, solutions, and go-to-market. The right person thinks like a platform architect, writes like an API designer, and ships like someone who has felt the consequences of a bad developer experience at 2am.
- Define and maintain Astra's API contract philosophy – versioning strategy, backwards compatibility standards, deprecation policies, and schema design principles
- Write detailed platform specs that engineering can ship from: precise, edge-case-aware, and grounded in how real customers build
- Own the platform roadmap – balancing foundational investments (auth, observability, extensibility) against customer-facing features and reliability work
- Conduct technical discovery with Astra's most sophisticated customers to identify platform gaps and extensibility needs
- Partner with engineering to review API design, maintain developer ergonomics standards, and hold the bar on platform quality
- Work with solutions and implementation teams to understand where customers get stuck, break, or build workarounds – and translate that into platform requirements
- Drive the developer experience roadmap in partnership with docs, solutions engineering, and DevRel functions as they mature
- Represent platform strategy in customer conversations, partnership discussions, and technical due diligence processes
Nice to have
- Experience building platform products at a BaaS, payments infrastructure, or developer tools company
- Familiarity with the control plane / data plane architecture pattern as applied to developer platforms
- Background in workflow or rules-engine product design – if-this-then-that style programmability at the infrastructure layer
- Exposure to agentic AI use cases and how AI-native systems impose new requirements on payment infrastructure (context, controls, micropayment patterns)
Conditions
- Competitive compensation with equity in a growing fintech company.
- Remote-first culture with flexible working arrangements
- Small team, big impact — your work directly supports Astra’s ability to scale responsibly
- Professional growth opportunities in compliance and risk management
- Mission-driven — build infrastructure that powers financial innovation while meeting the highest regulatory standards
Other
- Astra is building mission-critical infrastructure for moving money at scale. Our platform processes billions in annual transaction volume with 99.9%+ uptime, powering real-time transfers, bank debits, card disbursements, and complex financial compliance systems. We provide APIs and automation tools that enable businesses to move money programmatically while maintaining strict regulatory requirements.
- Astra's core API platform: authentication, versioning, pagination, rate limiting, error taxonomy, and the developer contracts that customers build on
- The control plane product: configuration surfaces, rule engines, programmable routing logic, and the levers customers use to customize money movement behavior
- Webhook and event architecture: delivery guarantees, retry logic, event schema design, and the observability customers need to build reliable integrations
- Developer experience: documentation quality, SDK surface, sandbox fidelity, onboarding flows, and the time-to-first-transaction metric
- Platform extensibility: how customers compose Astra's primitives – triggers, conditions, actions – to build complex payment workflows without custom engineering
- Platform reliability and SLA products: how Astra communicates uptime, exposes status, and gives customers visibility into degradation
- Long-term platform strategy: how Astra evolves from a multi-rail API into a programmable payments infrastructure layer, including agentic payment use cases
- 6+ years of product management experience, with at least 3 years building developer-facing platform or API products at a technical infrastructure company
- Deep expertise in API design – REST, webhooks, event-driven architecture – and strong opinions about what makes a platform great to build on
- Experience owning a platform roadmap across authentication, configuration, extensibility, and observability layers
- Strong understanding of how infrastructure companies create lock-in through developer experience, not just features
- Comfort reasoning about systems-level tradeoffs: latency vs. consistency, configurability vs. complexity, generality vs. opinionation
- Track record of operating as a principal-level IC – setting direction, influencing without authority, and driving outcomes across engineering and go-to-market
- Exceptional written communication; you can produce a platform spec that is simultaneously a product document and a technical contract
- Payments context is a plus, not a requirement – but intellectual curiosity about how money moves is required
- You'll define the platform architecture of a company that has real ambitions to be category-defining infrastructure – the Snowflake of payments
- You'll work directly with the founding team and the company's first Director of Product, with significant influence on product culture and engineering culture
- Astra is profitable at Series A – the growth trajectory is funded, not a bet on future capital raises
- The platform problems here are genuinely hard: multi-rail orchestration, programmable money movement, agentic payment primitives – this is not a CRUD application
- Astra is a remote-first company hiring only within the U.S. We value thoughtful collaboration, clarity, and initiative. We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer and are committed to building a diverse and inclusive team.