Principal Product Manager - Payments (12 month fixed term)

Description Melbourne or Sydney Fixed term to December 2027 It's our mission to bring people together by growing local food scenes. We're the world's leading personalised menu and ordering platform, trusted by 28 million foodies across 6,000+ locations. With 200 staff in five countries, and headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, me&u is the consolidation of two leading hospitality technology companies: Mr Yum and me&u, who merged in November 2023. Your mission: payments You'll own payments at me&u: the platform that moves money for our venues, and the payments products we build on top of it. We move billions of dollars a year for venues in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and the US - and we're setting up for a really big 2027. Accuracy of accounting and speed of product development matter in equal measure. By December 2027 you'll have retired our legacy payments stack, upgraded our ledger, and made pricing and billing flexible enough for new commercial models. As well as owning the critical payments platform, you'll build guest and hospitality operator experiences on top of that. The Product Manager role is changing AI has collapsed the cost of building software and the barrier to trying new things, and that's changing what a product manager does. The coordinating and waiting on engineering capacity is fast disappearing. What replaces it is a PM builder: someone who spots a commercial opportunity, proves it with a prototype the same day, and ships it with their team that week. Our designers already build working UI. Our engineers already make product calls. We're hiring Product Managers who blur the lines right back. We already work this way: the AFR profiled how our engineers run agents overnight so their days go to customers and problems, not keyboards. What you'll do • Spot the opportunities and set the strategy and roadmap across platform and products. You'll work closely with an engineering manager, tech leads, a product designer and our go-to-market team. • Make the commercial calls on pricing, packaging and value cases. We judge you on business outcomes, not output. • Prototype to persuade. Use AI to turn ideas into working prototypes, and get something clickable in front of venues and guests early. And if you can ship it yourself, then you absolutely should. • You know your numbers - authorisation rates, cost per transaction, disputes, payout timing - and you notice when one moves. Hospitality is tactile, so you'll also spend time in venues watching operators and guests pay. • Stay ahead of the rules. Scheme and regulatory change across Australia, the UK and the US - surcharging, tipping, tax - lands with you first, and you work with finance and legal to turn it into product before the deadline. • You’ll work closely with our payment partners on what we build with them, and keep our payments platform running seamlessly. • Be the gel between product, go-to-market and finance. The product and go-to-market link is our superpower at me&u, and in payments finance needs to be just as close. What you'll bring • Deep payments experience on a platform or marketplace model. You've owned merchant onboarding, fees and payouts on something like Stripe Connect or Adyen for Platforms, with money moving in production. B2B2C is even better. • You know the economics of a transaction cold - interchange, scheme fees, processing margin, disputes - and you've sat across the table from a payment provider. You can hold the venue's side and ours at the same time. • A payments track record you can point to. We don't count years, but we'll ask what you shipped, what it did to the numbers, and which calls you got right. • High agency. You don't wait for a brief, permission or perfect data. You find the shortest path to the outcome and take it. • AI is already how you analyse, write and think. You're prototyping with it and want to go further. • Technical enough to challenge. You read the API docs yourself and can hold your own in a design review on ledgers, webhooks and idempotency. • Clear communication. You can explain payments to people who don't live in it, and bring your stream and senior stakeholders with you. Nice to have • Payments in more than one country, ideally the UK or US as well as Australia • POS integrations • A soft spot for hospitality You'll want to know • The most important keywords in this JD are: payments, commercial, high-agency, customer-focused and AI. You will need to demonstrate all of these. Be creative. • We work flexibly, with offices in Sydney and Melbourne where the product team gathers each week.