Senior Product Manager - Payments & APIs
Xero · Vancouver, Canada · 15d ago
Our purpose
At Xero, we’re here to supercharge small businesses. By making small business more efficient every day, connecting them with big business technology and empowering a community behind them, their potential is limitless. When that happens, we’re not only helping small business, we’ll be building a stronger economy that can change the world.
How you’ll make an impact
Accounts payable is broken for small businesses. Managing and paying a bill today means stitching together three or four different tools — capturing documents in one place, entering data in another, chasing approvals over email, and making the payment in a bank portal. It is manual, error-prone, and it takes hours every week from people who should be running their business.
Xero’s bills and bill payment surface already serves over a million monthly active users globally: small business owners, the employees who keep their books, and professional bookkeepers working across dozens of clients at accounting firms. It runs on a system designed for a pre-agent world.
As a Senior Product Manager on Bills, you will own the layer underneath that surface — the API contracts, the data-access model and the permission architecture that decide what a person or an agent is allowed to read, write and pay on a customer’s behalf. That applies inside Bills, and it applies through Xero’s integrations with Claude, Copilot and our open-source MCP server. You will set the vision alongside a principal engineer, argue the customer’s case inside technical decisions, decide what the interface should be, and lead a team of engineers through a replatform that never takes those million users offline.
This is not a zero-to-one bet looking for users. The work already has them. What does not exist yet is the architecture underneath accounts payable that makes automated, agent-assisted and human-directed spend coherent, safe and trustworthy. That is the job.
Your impact will be measured through customer, operational and commercial outcomes — including automation and straight-through processing rates, bill payment adoption and volume, activation and retention across owner and bookkeeper personas, platform and API reliability, and the pace at which the replatform lands without customer disruption.
The team and how they connect
You will join the Bills team — 20+ engineers, designers and product managers across Toronto, Vancouver and Pittsburgh — working across core AP workflows, platform APIs, AI experiences and bill payments. The team partners closely with payment and infrastructure vendors, and with cross-functional teams across North America, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. This is a global role, based in Toronto or Vancouver with flexibility to work remotely, and the team comes together in person regularly to collaborate and align on strategy.
What you’ll do
Own the architecture underneath Payments
Develop the vision, strategy and roadmap for the API, data-access and permission layer that underpins bills and bill payments, in partnership with a principal engineer.
Define the contracts, data models and permission scopes that determine what any client — Xero’s own UI, a partner integration, or an AI agent — can read, write, approve and pay.
Decide where authority sits: what a person must confirm, what an agent may do unattended, what requires a second approver, and what can never be automated.
Sequence a replatform of a system serving more than a million monthly active users, with migration paths, dual-running periods and rollback plans that keep customers working throughout.
Own the cost and consequence of changing contracts that other teams and third parties depend on, including versioning, deprecation and breaking-change communication.
Identify opportunities to build reusable capabilities that serve Bills, the wider spend lifecycle and external developers, rather than isolated point solutions.
Remove toil from the end-to-end Accounts Payable workflow
Own products across the complete accounts payable journey: bill capture and understanding, coding and data extraction, approval routing, scheduling, payment execution, reconciliation and exception handling.
Build toward a world where bills arrive, get understood, get approved and get paid with minimal human toil, and where the entire spend lifecycle lives in one place.
Make Bill Pay the default way businesses pay through Xero, scaling bill payments across markets.
Identify valuable and differentiated customer problems, and frame clear solutions that can be tested, validated and delivered incrementally.
Ensure that platform complexity results in simple, understandable customer experiences rather than being passed through to the customer.
Build for multiple personas whose interests conflict
Lead customer research across the distinct user types on this surface: business owners, in-house finance and admin staff, and professional bookkeepers and advisors managing many clients at once.
Design for the tension between them — the owner who wants a bill paid now, the bookkeeper who needs control and auditability, the firm that needs consistency across a client portfolio — and make the trade-off explicit rather than averaging it away.
Partner closely with Design and Engineering to create high-quality experiences across web, mobile and embedded surfaces, as well as programmatic ones.
Use customer data, qualitative insight and market intelligence to inform product strategy, prioritisation and roadmap decisions.
Ship AI and agent capabilities customers can trust
Define how AI and agents participate in accounts payable: what they suggest, what they act on, what they escalate, and how the customer stays in control.
Own the quality bar for LLM-powered capabilities — evaluation sets, confidence thresholds, human-in-the-loop design, fallback behaviour and observable failure modes — and hold the line on it before launch.
Prototype your own ideas, including in code, rather than waiting for engineering capacity to test a hypothesis.
Shape how Xero’s accounts payable capabilities are exposed to external agent platforms, including our MCP server and integrations with Claude and Copilot.
Design for an error-intolerant workflow: this product moves real money, and a wrong answer costs a customer real money and real trust.
Navigate risk, compliance and operational complexity
Partner with Risk, Compliance, Legal, Security and Operations to build products that meet regulatory, security and operational requirements across markets.
Take responsibility for risks arising from authorisation and access control, financial crime, privacy and responsible data use, data accuracy, regulatory change and service availability.
Account for market-specific gating in payments and money movement — including US money transmission, UK FCA and open banking requirements, and Australian licensing and payment rails — when sequencing launches.
Lead trade-off decisions that balance customer experience, risk exposure, regulatory obligation, technical complexity and commercial outcome.
Treat operational processes, support tooling and exception management as part of the product, not an afterthought — including failed payments, duplicate bills, incorrect approvals, reversals and disputes.
Drive strategy, execution and commercial outcomes
Develop and execute roadmaps that align customer needs, AP strategy, platform architecture and Xero’s broader business objectives, including the Melio acquisition and Xero’s North America growth agenda.
Establish clear product goals, success metrics and OKRs, and be accountable for moving them.
Take an active role in annual and quarterly planning, including funding, prioritisation and resourcing discussions.
Lead release and rollout strategy so that changes land safely and iteratively across customer cohorts and markets.
Monitor and interrogate customer, commercial and operational results, and lead interventions where outcomes are not meeting expectations.
Understand the economics of the product, including payment volume, adoption, pricing, processing cost, margin and revenue.
Make clear prioritisation decisions that balance immediate delivery against the long-term evolution of the platform.
Lead through cross-functional influence
Build strong relationships across Product, Engineering, Design, Risk, Compliance, Operations, Finance, Partnerships and Go-to-Market teams.
Create clarity on what is being built, why it matters, how it will work and when it will be delivered.
Hold your own in architecture and design reviews on data models, API contracts and migration sequencing, and bring a position rather than only questions.
Drive decision-making across complex stakeholder groups and act as tie-breaker when consensus cannot be reached.
Represent the products you own in senior leadership, product, architecture and payments forums, and in front of customers and partners.
Mentor and support other Product Managers, raising the standard of platform and AI product expertise across Xero.
Success looks like
Bills arrive, get understood, get approved and get paid in Xero with materially less human effort than they require today.
There is a clear, documented and well-reasoned answer to what an agent is allowed to do with a customer’s money in Xero — and customers and partners trust it.
The API and permission layer underneath accounts payable is coherent, versioned and extensible, and new clients, markets and payment capabilities can be supported without duplication or rework.
The replatform progresses on a sequence the team believes in, with no material disruption to the million-plus customers using the surface every month.
Owners, in-house finance staff and professional bookkeepers each get an experience suited to how they actually work, and you can name the trade-offs you made between them.
AI-powered capabilities ship with defined evaluation criteria, measured quality, understood failure modes and appropriate human control — and improve after launch on evidence.
Bill Pay adoption, payment volume, automation rate, activation and retention are improving, and your contribution to that is clear.
Product risks and dependencies are identified early and managed in partnership with Engineering, Risk, Compliance and Operations.
Stakeholders understand the vision, strategy, roadmap and key trade-offs — and engineers come to you first when a decision needs making.
Other Product Managers are developing through your coaching and knowledge-sharing.
You demonstrate and amplify Xero’s values.
What you’ll bring with you
Essential experience
This role sits below the interface as much as in front of it, and the bar reflects that. You will bring:
Experience shipping below the UI. You have delivered changes to APIs, integration layers or shared services as part of delivering a wider product, and you know what it costs to change a contract other people depend on. Ideally you have owned a public or partner API through a breaking change.
Substantive AI product experience. You have shipped an LLM-powered capability that customers actually used, and you can talk about evaluations, failure modes and confidence thresholds unprompted — including what your product got wrong in production and what you did about it. You use AI aggressively in your own work and prototype in code.
Multi-persona B2B product experience. You have built a workflow serving several distinct user types whose interests conflict, and you can name a specific trade-off you made between two of them.
Error-intolerant domains. You have built products where a mistake costs money or carries regulatory consequence — payments, payroll, tax, treasury, lending, legal or clinical workflows.
Significant product management experience in a software development environment, across the full product lifecycle — typically five or more years in product, or comparable time as a founder, consultant or technical individual contributor in a payments and/or commerce domain.
Deep accounts payable, bookkeeping, accounting or finance-team domain experience is a strong advantage but not a requirement, and experience with payment rails, regulatory-gated launches or fintech infrastructure is similarly valuable. Product experience confined to feature delivery on top of an existing platform, without direct involvement in the interfaces, contracts or data models underneath, is unlikely to be enough on its own for this role.
Product leadership
A strong track record of addressing customer needs through the innovative use of technology.
Experience developing successful product strategies, roadmaps and long-term plans — setting direction rather than receiving a spec.
Demonstrated ability to operate in technically complex and highly ambiguous environments, and to start before the problem is fully defined.
Strong product judgement and the ability to make decisions with incomplete information.
A track record of owning activation, retention, revenue or an equivalent metric and moving it — you can name the metric, the movement, and the trade-off you made to get it.
Self-direction under ambiguity, with minimal supervision required to define direction and drive outcomes.
Demonstrated ability to influence decisions at all levels of an organisation.
Technical and commercial understanding
Ability to work as a peer with engineers and architects on platform design, APIs, data models, permission and authorisation models, system dependencies and technical trade-offs.
Understanding of migration and replatform sequencing in a live, high-volume system, and of the risks that come with it.
Strong understanding of how AI and agent systems are built and evaluated, including retrieval, tool use, evaluation design and the limits of model reliability.
Ability to translate customer and business needs into clear product requirements and technical specifications.
Understanding of product economics, including volume, cost, margin, pricing and revenue.
Experience evaluating third-party providers and making build, buy or partner decisions.
Familiarity with the regulatory, risk, security and operational considerations involved in moving money.
Customer and data orientation
Strong experience conducting customer research and converting insight into product decisions.
Ability to identify and clearly articulate complex customer problems — and to talk about users in the plural.
Experience developing MVPs, incremental solutions and experiments that validate product assumptions.
Strong analytical skills, using quantitative and qualitative data to make decisions.
Ability to establish meaningful success criteria and monitor ongoing performance.
Ability to translate complex information for technical, commercial, operational and executive audiences.
Cross-functional leadership
Demonstrated success working with diverse stakeholder groups across multiple engineering teams, geographies and third-party partners.
Ability to lead through influence across Product, Engineering, Design, Risk, Compliance, Operations, Finance and Go-to-Market.
Strong communication, facilitation and stakeholder-management skills, and comfort presenting to executives and to customers.
Ability to navigate difficult decisions, resolve ambiguity and create alignment across teams and geographies.
Willingness to disagree with an engineer, and to be disagreed with, in service of the customer.
Experience mentoring and coaching Product Managers and cross-functional team members.
Critical capabilities
Love customer problems
Lead the use of customer research approaches and methodologies to generate meaningful insight across owner, in-house finance and bookkeeper personas.
Clearly define and articulate complex customer problems, including where personas conflict.
Develop incremental solutions and experiments that validate customer and product assumptions.
Ensure that platform and agent complexity results in simple, understandable and trustworthy customer experiences.
Look to the future
Develop compelling product strategies and roadmaps that align customer, commercial and platform objectives.
Anticipate how immediate architectural decisions will constrain future agent capabilities, markets, partners and products.
Identify opportunities to create reusable capabilities rather than isolated point solutions.
Explore new technologies, models and business models that change how small businesses manage and pay their bills.
Work the Xero way
Lead effective product prioritisation and decision-making.
Establish strong product and delivery practices within the team, without relying on a program manager to hold the plan.
Coordinate across products and teams to deliver end-to-end customer outcomes.
Ship iteratively, learn from outcomes and continuously improve the product.
Demonstrate commercial acumen
Understand the markets, customer segments and competitive environment for accounts payable and bill payment.
Balance customer value, platform investment, risk and commercial outcome.
Define success criteria that reflect customer needs and product-market fit.
Use adoption, volume, cost, margin and revenue data to guide product decisions.
Do it together
Create alignment across complex and diverse stakeholder groups.
Communicate a clear and compelling product narrative.
Build productive relationships across teams, functions, markets and geographies.
Mentor others and raise the standard of product, platform and AI expertise across Xero.
Explore the data
Use data to understand customer behaviour, automation performance and operational outcomes.
Combine insight from customer research, product telemetry, support interactions and market trends.
Translate information into clear recommendations and decisions.
Establish measurement, evaluation and observability as core parts of product development.
Why this role
Most AI product roles are a bet on a zero-to-one that may never find users. This one is the opposite. More than a million people already do this work in Xero every month, and the mandate is to define how agents get to touch it.
Xero has already put the pieces on the table: a US$2.5B acquisition of Melio, an open-source MCP server, a live Claude integration, and a new North America Product and Technology Hub. What does not exist yet is the architecture underneath accounts payable that makes it all coherent. That is what you would own.
Compensation & Total Rewards
At Xero, we value the impact and skills you bring to the team. We believe in a Total Package philosophy - ensuring your value is recognized through a holistic lens that includes base salary, performance incentives, and world-class benefits.
The expected base salary range for this role is CA$167,400 – CA$209,200.
Individual pay is determined by various factors, including geography, level of experience, and the specific skills you bring to the role.
In addition to base pay, Xero’s roles are eligible for the following forms of variable compensation:
Variable Pay: Permanent employees are eligible to participate in our annual bonus and equity (RSU) programs. You may also be eligible for performance-based cash or equity (RSUs) incentives depending on your role level, and company performance.
Comprehensive Benefits: World-class health, wellness, and retirement programs. Xero Perks including Wellbeing days, generous leave, and dedicated professional development budgets.
This is a posting for an existing vacancy.
Xero uses AI to help screen applications based on job-related qualifications. These tools assist our recruiters but do not make automated hiring decisions. A human recruiter reviews all candidates before any hiring action is taken.