Senior Product Manager - 529 Prepaid

The posting

Vestwell is the financial technology company powering the new savings economy. The New York City-based fintech platform redefines how people save for the critical aspects of life across retirement, education, and healthcare savings needs. Today, Vestwell enables over 790,000 businesses and more than 2.75 million active savers, with over $57 billion in assets saved across all 50 United States.

Vestwell offers a range of products, including workplace-delivered retirement plans, employer-offered student loan repayment benefits, and various savings accounts for education, emergencies, and individuals with disabilities.

Vestwell's platform serves a diverse clientele, including financial advisers, employers, third-party administrators, financial institutions, payroll providers, government agencies, and individual savers. To learn more, visit vestwell.com

Who Are We Looking For? Vestwell Government Savings powers state-sponsored savings programs, including 529 college savings, ABLE, child savings accounts, and state auto-IRA programs. We're building something new for our platform: a full recordkeeping and saver experience for a prepaid tuition 529 program, where families buy tuition credits at today's rates instead of investing in a portfolio. We're looking for an experienced, hands-on Senior Product Manager who loves solving complex problems and can own large, ambiguous areas with minimal direction. This is a greenfield build with a fixed deadline, so you'll be in the details from day one, working side by side with a delivery lead PM and partners across engineering, QA, design, operations, servicing, relationship management, marketing, etc.

You're a systems thinker who enjoys problems where the details have to be exactly right. You're comfortable owning an area with some ambiguity, you ask hard questions early, and you can explain complex topics clearly to engineers, operations, and clients alike. You've owned large, cross-functional initiatives before and know how to keep a complex build moving when the path isn't clear.

What Will You Be Doing? You'll own the most complex functional areas of this build end to end, from discovery and requirements through testing and launch, and you'll be one of the people on the team who knows exactly how the system should behave. You'll have your hand in product requirements, functional requirements, acceptance criteria, test cases, and you'll need strong relationships with operations, engineering, QA, and business stakeholders to get it delivered. You'll also help set the bar for how product work is done on the team, guiding other PMs and acting as a go-to product voice for internal teams, clients, and partners.

Day-to-Day, You May Also Be Expected To:

• Understand program goals and stakeholder needs, and translate them into buildable features with clear intended impact
• Own discovery and requirements for your functional areas, including business requirements, functional requirements, and use cases
• Partner with engineering to break down requirements into stories with clear acceptance criteria
• Provide constant, iterative feedback to the development team, including identifying bugs and helping resolve them
• Complete functional testing and provide product sign-off when features are ready for production release
• Work alongside the delivery lead PM to keep scope, dependencies, and risks visible across squads, and make tradeoff decisions as new information comes in
• Partner with operations, client teams, and external partners to make sure what we build works in day-to-day operations
• Use data to validate assumptions, investigate issues, and inform product decisions
• Lead discovery for ambiguous, high-risk areas, framing options and tradeoffs for leadership
• Mentor and guide other PMs on the team, reviewing requirements and raising the quality bar
• Represent product with clients and external partners, and drive alignment across teams without needing escalation

Requirements The Necessities

• 5+ years of Product Management experience, including owning a large, cross-functional initiative end to end
• Experience building complex financial or transaction-based systems (e.g., recordkeeping, payments, ledgers)
• Exceptional business and systems analysis skills
• Ability to thoroughly understand and document business/functional requirements and business use cases
• Experience driving the software development lifecycle in an Agile environment
• Ability to work in a fast-paced, project-oriented environment and meet deadlines under tight time constraints
• Ability to work independently as well as collaboratively across Product, Engineering, QA, and Operations
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Ability to interface with internal stakeholders, executives, and external clients
• Experience with SQL and data integrations (e.g., APIs, JSON, XML, file-based integrations)

The Extras

• Experience mentoring or guiding other PMs
• 529, ABLE, or other government savings program experience
• Experience with a data conversion or platform migration
• Comfort using AI tools in your day-to-day PM workflow

This role will be based in either the New York City, Austin, or King of Prussia office, and will be part of Vestwell's hybrid in-office operation.

The expected base salary range for this position is $150K - $160K base. This position is eligible to participate in the Company Bonus Pool and is eligible to receive new hire equity in the Company. Please note that salary bands are based on NY and other similar metro areas and may differ based on where the role is ultimately hired.

Full-Time Employee Benefits We’re an innovative, high-growth company with an exciting future ahead. At Vestwell, we prioritize employee wellbeing through comprehensive health benefits, generous time off, and a dedicated Employee Wellbeing Committee. Our hybrid work model offers flexibility while providing access to our collaborative offices in Midtown Manhattan, Austin, King of Prussia, and Scottsdale. And, of course, as a company focused on helping people save for the future, we offer a competitive 401(k) plan.

Interview Process Our interview process starts the same for every candidate with 1-2 introductory conversations to learn more about your background, interests, and what you're looking for, while also giving you the opportunity to learn more about Vestwell and the team. From there, the process varies by role but typically includes a skills or experience-based assessment, such as a coding interview, portfolio review, or deeper discussion of your relevant experience. Successful candidates then move on to a virtual or in-person interview panel. Before extending an offer, we complete a reference check with a current or former manager and a peer. Throughout the process, we prioritize transparency, clear communication, and minimizing surprises.

For your awareness you will only receive correspondence from [email protected] any other domain not ending in vestwell.com is not our Recruitment team.

Vestwell’s Privacy Policy. Attention California residents: In the course of conducting our business and complying with federal, state, and local government regulations governing such matters as employment, tax, insurance, etc., we must collect Personal Information from you. Should you accept employment with Vestwell you may view our California Privacy Rights Act here: Vestwell’s California Privacy Rights Policy.