Payments Product Lead, Genius Restaurant Platform

Location: Charlotte, NC | Travel: ~25-35% domestic and international | Reports to: Senior Manager, Product Management

About the Role

Genius builds the operating system for the restaurant and hospitality industry, powering a wide range of operators with POS, payments, and operational tools built for the realities of the business.

Payments sits at the heart of every transaction on our platform. As we grow our footprint across new markets, channels, and customer segments, and invest in a new generation of Genius-built payment hardware, we need a senior product leader to own the payments strategy and execution end-to-end.

This is a high-impact, high-visibility role for a payments PM who can operate equally well at the strategic level, defining a multi-year payments architecture, partnership strategy, and global expansion plan, and at the tactical level, owning device certifications, processor escalations, hardware launch readiness, and the in-store checkout experience that thousands of merchants depend on every day.

What You'll Own

In-store and above-store payment acceptance

You'll own the end-to-end payment experience across our platform, from the moment a guest taps a card at a terminal to how those transactions reconcile in the merchant's back office. That includes card-present flows on countertop, handheld, kiosk, and in-store ordering hardware; card-not-present scenarios for online ordering, QR pay-at-table, mobile order-ahead, and curbside; tip handling, tip pooling, split tender, partial auth, refunds, voids, and offline mode; wallet support (Apple Pay, Google Pay, Tap to Pay), EMV contactless, and emerging local payment methods in international markets; and reconciliation, settlement, and reporting that operators actually trust.

Launching the new payment platform

You'll be the product lead for a new generation of Genius-built payment hardware designed to be embedded across our in-store ordering and checkout experiences. This is a foundational launch that changes our relationship with payments from "integrator" to "device owner," and you'll own the product side of making it real.

• Defining the product requirements and the merchant- and guest-facing experience the new payment device enables across guest-facing ordering surfaces (kiosks, handhelds, counter terminals, and any future form factors).
• Partnering with hardware engineering, firmware, and security teams on device specifications, EMV kernel selection, P2PE architecture, and key injection and management strategy.
• Driving the certification roadmap for the device across networks (Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Discover, Interac, regional schemes) and across each payment integration the device must support.
• Defining the integration model between the new payment device and our POS and in-store ordering software, including semi-integrated architecture, message flows, error handling, reversal logic, and offline behavior.
• Owning the launch plan: pilot merchants, rollout sequencing across customer segments and channels, channel readiness, support enablement, and the operational playbook for a hardware product in the field.
• Establishing the metrics that define success, including device uptime, transaction latency, auth rate on the new device versus legacy, support ticket volume, and merchant-reported reliability.

This is a multi-year program, and the new payment device is the beginning of a Genius-owned hardware roadmap. You'll set the product foundation that future devices build on.

Multi-integration strategy and unification

Our platform runs multiple payment integrations today, a reality driven by customer needs, vertical-specific requirements, and the demands of different sales channels and geographies. You'll own the strategy for how those integrations evolve: which to invest in, which to consolidate, which to sunset, and what target architecture lets us scale without continuing to add new pipes for every new channel or market. You'll define the principles for when a new integration is justified versus when an existing one should be extended, and you'll lead the multi-year work of converging toward a more unified payments stack, including how the new Genius device fits into that target state, without disrupting in-flight business.

Device certifications and compliance

You'll own the device certification roadmap across our entire hardware fleet, including both third-party terminals we support today and the new payment hardware program, and across every payment integration. That means tracking certification states across Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Discover, Interac, and regional networks; planning EMV kernel updates, PCI compliance cycles, and network mandate work (network tokenization, contactless PIN changes, 3DS updates); and ensuring that no merchant on any integration is ever blocked from accepting payments because a certification has lapsed. You'll partner closely with hardware, security, and engineering teams to sequence this work against feature delivery.

Payment partner relationships

You'll be the primary product-side relationship owner for our payment processors, gateways, and middleware partners globally. That includes regular operating cadences, joint roadmap planning, escalations during incidents, and negotiation of new capabilities and commercial terms alongside our BD and finance teams. You'll be the person who knows what each partner is good at, what they're not, and where they're heading, and who makes sure Genius's needs are visible and prioritized in each partner's roadmap, including the work required to support the new Genius device on each integration.

Global payments launch and geographic expansion

As we expand into new international markets, you'll lead the launch of Genius payments globally. That means selecting and onboarding local acquirers and processors; supporting local payment methods (SEPA, iDEAL, Interac, Pix, and others as we expand); enabling multi-currency and FX handling; meeting regulatory requirements (PSD2/SCA in Europe, regional equivalents elsewhere); and certifying our hardware, including the new Genius device, in each market. You'll define the playbook for entering a new geography and make each subsequent launch faster and cheaper than the last.

US channel expansion

As we grow our US footprint across multiple sales channels, you'll own the payments work that makes each channel successful. That includes the configurability that lets channel partners board merchants with their own pricing, branding, and feature entitlements without forking the product; the integration patterns that let partners plug into Genius cleanly; and the roadmap coordination that keeps channel needs visible alongside direct-sale priorities.

Payments roadmap delivery

You'll translate all of the above into a prioritized payments roadmap across our product portfolio, sequenced against business needs, partner dependencies, and the Genius device launch timeline. You'll work cross-functionally with engineering, hardware, design, risk, compliance, legal, finance, BD, sales, and support to ship, and you'll own the metrics that prove it's working: auth rate, transaction latency, terminal uptime, certification coverage, partner SLA performance, dispute rate, device launch milestones, and merchant-reported payment NPS.

What We're Looking For

Required experience

• 7+ years of product management experience, with at least 4 years owning payments products, ideally at a POS, merchant acquirer, processor, gateway, or vertical SaaS company with embedded payments.
• Deep working knowledge of card-present payments: EMV, contactless, PCI DSS, P2PE, secure architectures, semi-integrated patterns, terminal certifications, and the realities of running a hardware fleet in production.
• Hands-on experience managing multiple payment processor or gateway integrations simultaneously. You've lived the complexity and have opinions about how to manage it.
• Track record of shipping payments features that moved real business metrics (auth rate, fraud bps, processing margin, time-to-board, etc.).
• Experience working directly with payment processors, networks, and sponsor banks as partners, including running operating cadences, managing escalations, and negotiating capability roadmaps.

Strongly preferred

• Experience launching or significantly contributing to a payment hardware product (terminal, PIN pad, mPOS reader, or embedded payment device), including the certification, security, and field rollout work that comes with it.
• Experience in restaurant, hospitality, retail, or another card-present-heavy vertical.
• International payments experience, including local payment methods, multi-currency, regulatory frameworks outside the US, and launching payments in new geographies.
• Experience designing for multiple sales channels with channel-specific configuration needs.
• Experience leading platform unification or migration work, converging multiple legacy stacks onto a target architecture without breaking the business.

How you work

• You're equally comfortable in a partner QBR, an EMV certification escalation, a hardware design review, and a roadmap conversation with leadership.
• You have strong opinions about payments architecture but hold them loosely when the business reality demands pragmatism.
• You communicate clearly with technical and non-technical audiences. Engineers, hardware teams, payment partners, sales leaders, and operators all need different framings of the same work.
• You're comfortable with the ambiguity of a role that spans our product portfolio, many integrations, a major hardware launch, and many channels and geographies, and you bring structure to that ambiguity rather than being paralyzed by it.
• You're willing to travel, including to partner offices, to merchants in the field, to international markets as we expand, to hardware vendors and certification labs, and to industry events. Expect roughly 25-35% travel, with periods that run higher during the device launch, certifications, and market entries.

What Success Looks Like

In your first 90 days: You'll have built a clear map of every payment integration across our platform: what each does, which merchants and channels it serves, its certification state, its commercial terms, and its strategic role. You'll have a working understanding of the Genius device program, established relationships with hardware, firmware, and security counterparts, and met every external payment partner.

In your first 9 months: You'll have published a multi-year payments strategy for the Genius platform, including a target architecture, a partner consolidation point of view, a certification operating model, the device's role in the platform, and a sequenced roadmap aligned to our growth across markets, channels, and customer segments. You'll have driven the new payment hardware program through key certification and pilot milestones, launched payments in at least one new international market, and shipped meaningful improvements to in-store payment acceptance across our platform.

In your second year and beyond: You'll have brought the Genius payment device to general availability across in-store guest-facing experiences, made measurable progress on unifying the payments stack, launched payments in additional international markets, brought new US channels online, and built a payments function that's a genuine competitive advantage for Genius rather than a source of complexity to manage.