Senior Platform Product Manager

Arlington, Virginia or Richmond, Virginia

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.

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. 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.

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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…