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Astra is building mission-critical infrastructure for moving money at scale, processing billions in annual transaction volume with 99.9%+ uptime. The company provides APIs and automation tools enabling businesses to move money programmatically while maintaining strict regulatory compliance.
You will drive the evolution of Astra's platform layer—the APIs, developer experience, control plane, and foundational infrastructure products that transform Astra from a payments gateway into a Payments Cloud. This is a principal-level individual contributor role with broad scope, working directly with the leadership team and partnering deeply with engineering, solutions, and go-to-market functions.
Key areas of impact include:
- Core API platform: authentication, versioning, pagination, rate limiting, error taxonomy, and developer contracts
- Control plane product: configuration surfaces, rule engines, programmable routing logic, and customization levers
- Webhook and event architecture: delivery guarantees, retry logic, event schema design, and observability
- Developer experience: documentation, SDK surface, sandbox fidelity, onboarding flows, and time-to-first-transaction metrics
- Platform extensibility: how customers compose primitives (triggers, conditions, actions) to build complex payment workflows
- Platform reliability and SLA products: uptime communication, status exposure, and degradation visibility
- Long-term platform strategy: evolution toward programmable payments infrastructure and agentic payment use cases
Day-to-day responsibilities include defining Astra's API contract philosophy and versioning strategy, writing detailed platform specs for engineering, shaping the platform roadmap to balance foundational investments against customer-facing features, conducting technical discovery with sophisticated customers, partnering with engineering on API design and developer ergonomics, working with solutions teams to translate customer pain points into platform requirements, driving the developer experience roadmap, and representing platform strategy in customer and partnership conversations.
Requirements:
- 6+ years of product management experience, with at least 3 years building developer-facing platform or API products at a technical infrastructure company
- Deep expertise in API design (REST, webhooks, event-driven architecture) and strong opinions about platform quality
- Experience owning a platform roadmap across authentication, configuration, extensibility, and observability layers
- Strong understanding of how infrastructure companies create lock-in through developer experience
- Comfort reasoning about systems-level tradeoffs: latency vs. consistency, configurability vs. complexity, generality vs. opinionation
- Track record of operating as a principal-level IC—setting direction, influencing without authority, driving outcomes across engineering and go-to-market
- Exceptional written communication; ability to produce platform specs that function as both product documents and technical contracts
- Intellectual curiosity about how money moves (payments context is a plus, not required)
- Ability and willingness to travel up to ~15% annually
Preferred experience includes building platform products at a BaaS, payments infrastructure, or developer tools company; familiarity with control plane/data plane architecture patterns; background in workflow or rules-engine product design; and exposure to agentic AI use cases and their implications for payment infrastructure.
