Technical Program Manager, Payments & Billing

Role overview

Acorns is seeking a Technical Program Manager (Payments & Billing) to lead the evolution of its Payments, Billing, and Account Linking infrastructure. You will help architect and operate payment, point-of-sale, and money movement systems, driving improvements and delivery of new product launches while maintaining strong financial posture and scalable systems.

Responsibilities

• Payments & billing roadmap: Collaborate with Engineering, Finance, and Data Science to define and execute the payments/billing roadmap.
• Account linking improvements: Identify opportunities and drive delivery for bank account connectivity, improving account linking and verification experiences.
• Monitoring & reliability: Build sophisticated monitoring to prevent blind spots and future issues.
• Billing/payment strategy: Define how Acorns will use Recurly, Apple Pay, Google Pay, debit card providers, and ACH to reduce customer friction and implement controls to prevent billing issues.
• Money movement expansion: Expand beyond Apple Pay/Google Pay to integrate future rails such as Venmo, Zelle, and other emerging payment networks.
• Operational efficiency: Treat operations like a customer by building workflow strategies and tools to scale internal teams, including managing payment exceptions and billing inquiries.
• Vendor/partner management: Lead high-stakes relationships and technical integrations with payment processors, bank SaaS providers, payment vendors, and merchants.

Requirements

• 5+ years of Technical Program Management experience in Fintech, with a track record of running complex projects that balance technical constraints and customer needs.
• Strong knowledge of Apple Pay, Google Pay, and card/prepaid payment mechanics, including working with payment processors, POS systems, and banking institutions.
• Technical familiarity with APIs and SQL, and understanding of payment processing and account linking mechanics (e.g., Plaid).
• Deep understanding of account connectivity and optimization for conversion and security (e.g., Plaid, manual linking, automated verification).
• Data-driven mindset: ability to analyze data and articulate tradeoffs between security and customer friction.
• Customer and operational obsession; high drive and precision in delivery.