Technical Program Manager, Payments & Billing

TECHNICAL PROGRAM MANAGER, PAYMENTS & BILLING | ACORNS At Acorns, our mission is to look after the financial best interests of the up-and-coming, beginning with the empowering, proud step of micro-investing. How do we accomplish our mission? Our values: Lead With Heart, Make Bold Decisions, Always Build Trust, Never Stop Growing, and Find a Way. These values guide us, and our mission drives us. Come join us and help deliver financial wellness for the whole family, putting the tools of wealth-making into everyone’s hands. Acorns is seeking a Technical Program Manager to lead the evolution of our Payments, Billing, and Account Linking infrastructure. In this role, you will be the architect and operator of the payment, point of sale, and money movement systems for millions of customers. You will focus on identifying improvements in the current systems and own the delivery of new product launches to provide the highest quality customer experience while maintaining a robust financial posture and scaling our systems for global use. Acorns is a remote-first organization, offering the flexibility to work remotely while providing optional access to office space in Irvine, CA. WHAT YOU WILL DO AT ACORNS: - Infrastructure Strategy: Collaborate with Engineering, Finance, and Data Science to define and execute the payments and billing roadmap, ensuring Acorns’ management of funding sources and account linking is able to scale and our billing platform is dynamic to enable net new product opportunities. - Seamless Account Linking: Identify areas of opportunity and drive the delivery of improvements for bank account connectivity, improving the customer experience across account linking and verification experiences and building sophisticated monitoring to prevent blind spots and future issues. - Billing and Payment Excellence: Develop the strategy for how Acorns will leverage technologies like Recurly, Apple Pay, Google Pay, debit card providers, and ACH to reduce friction for our customers and implement the proper controls to prevent future billing concerns, optimizing the customer experience and delivery high quality product improvements. - Frictionless Money Movement: Expand Acorns ecosystem beyond Apple Pay and Google Pay to include future integrations like Venmo, Zelle, and other emerging rails, optimizing both the backend architecture and the customer experience. - Operational Efficiency: Treat operations as a customer by driving workflow strategies and tools that help scale the internal team's value and efficiency in managing payment exceptions and billing inquiries. - Vendor & Partner Management: Lead high-stakes relationships and technical integrations with processors, bank SaaS providers, payment vendors, and merchants. WHAT YOU WILL BRING TO ACORNS: - Technical Product Mastery: 5+ years of Technical Program Management experience in Fintech, with a proven track record of running complex projects that balance technical constraints with customer needs. - Payments Expertise: Strong foundational knowledge of the mechanics of apple pay, google pay, credit/debit cards, prepaid cards, and the nuances of working with payment processors, point of sale systems, and banking institutions. - Technical Savvy: An understanding of APIs, SQL, and the mechanics of payment processing and account linking (e.g., Plaid). - Account Connectivity Knowledge: Deep understanding of account connectivity (e.g., Plaid, manual linking, and automated verification) and how to optimize these for conversion and security. - Customer Obsession: A mindset that prioritizes both the Acorns customer and our internal operations team, with the ability to build a seamless payment platform that reflects our brand. - Scientific Approach: Expertise in data analysis and the ability to articulate using data the tradeoff between enhancing security postures against adding friction to the customer experience. - Hunger to deliver game-changing products. - Exceptional drive and precision