Product Lead (cards)

About Griffin

Hi, we’re Griffin! We’re the bank for companies who want to build and launch financial products.

Our context

We're rapidly heading towards a future where most of us access financial services through technology companies rather than high street banks. All sorts of companies are now embedding financial products into their apps and user journeys so that their customers can seamlessly make payments, manage expenses, take out loans, save, invest, and do more.

The problem is that companies are still dependent on legacy banking infrastructure if they want to offer regulated financial products. They need to either partner directly with an incumbent bank and/or stitch together middleware from various Banking as a Service (BaaS) providers. This process is slow, expensive, and complex and makes it very hard for companies to get new financial products off the ground.

At Griffin, we want to change this.

Our purpose

We want to make it easy for companies to bring finance to their customers at the point of greatest relevance. So, we built a bank.

But not just any bank! Griffin is a technology platform and a bank: fully regulated, API-first, developer-centric, and purpose-built to serve innovative fintechs and brands who want to build and embed financial products.

Learn More About What We Do.

Our culture

Our culture is our most important asset, and one of the ways we safeguard it is by being extremely intentional about hiring the right people. We won't hire people who don’t seem like a strong fit for our core values, even if they're otherwise extremely qualified.

We also believe that smart, motivated, conscientious people thrive in high-trust, high-autonomy environments. That’s why we’re transparent by default, and we encourage open discussion and challenge across all levels of the organisation. We’re also remote-first, asynchronous, and fully flexible - because you're the expert on how and when you do your best work.

Learn more about our culture.

The Product Team

Product sits within our Craft function, which also includes Engineering and Design. Craft is responsible holistically for the things we make for our customers.

We run a Silicon Valley-style product team, by which we mean your job is to tell the story of why we should do anything. The answer to why is your primary job.

Why needs to thread many needles. Does this solve a customer problem? Is it valuable? Can we monetise it (profitably)? Does this make the platform more valuable overall? Thinking about all of the above, is this the best thing for us to do NOW?

The details of some elements of solution design like “what” and “how” are often best left to senior engineers, who will grow to be as familiar with the problem space as you are while having a much more intimate understanding of what is actually technically possible. We do expect you to be able to guide on “what” and “how” from a regulatory perspective, however.

And “who” and “when” are decisions that you as a PL shouldn’t make in isolation, but should make alongside the rest of the company in considering the company’s product roadmap as a whole.

We have two other Product Leads - one who owns banking and payments, and one who owns financial crime and all other core platform features. It’s a very small team, with huge autonomy given to each Product Lead to discover new opportunities, shape projects, structure work with their engineering and design colleagues, and ultimately set their roadmap.

Who you are

We’re looking for a highly autonomous individual contributor to launch and grow Griffin’s card issuing business.

We look for a specific set of personality traits in Product Leads, based on what we know makes someone successful here:

• You have strong opinions - your views are right at least 80% of the time, and you’re able to clearly explain why you’re right in a way that successfully persuades other people. And - if you’re wrong, which you will be sometimes, you need to be able to acknowledge it and pivot quickly with ZERO EGO.
• You are ruthless in your willingness to go straight to the source. Don’t know something? Talk to customers. Talk to card schemes. Talk to industry veterans. FIND WHERE KNOWLEDGE RESIDES, AND GET IT.
• You care deeply about commercial viability. Do the unit economics make sense? What does market pricing look like at the moment? How thin are the margins? How much fraud kills product viability?
• You should be tech savvy. You should have cut your teeth at a few startups. You should know what an API is, what JSON looks like, how a webhook functions.
  
  

The ideal candidate for this job will have most of the following:

• Prior product management or product leadership experience.
• Experience working on financial services products. Some prior experience in card issuing is a MUST have, with bonus points for more broad banking, account, payment, or core financial infrastructure experience.
• Experience working on API-first products.
  
  

What will you be doing here?

As the Product Lead at Griffin for cards, you will...

• Own the P&L for our card products, including negotiating and overseeing key commercial terms with processors, networks, and other suppliers.
• Define our MVP and be ruthless in cutting scope until only what truly matters remains.
• Manage the ever-growing backlog of good ideas for which there will never be enough time.
• Work closely with Craft (engineering, design, and the other Product Leads) to build out the necessary integrations, API endpoints, and user interfaces.
• Work closely with Service (operations) to establish our target operating model for fraud, chargebacks, card creation and retirement, scheme certification, regulatory compliance, and audits.
• Work closely with Connect (sales, marketing) to define pricing, packaging, and go-to-market, and to align with our existing product suite and bundling.
• Regularly talk to our customers about what they want and how we might be able to provide that.
• Define and track key metrics to optimise performance and drive growth.
  
  

What can we offer you?

We are an early stage startup and we're working hard to expand our benefits package. We're planning to add to this list in the future.

• 25 days off a year + winter break(we close in between Christmas and New Year) + bank holidays
• Remote-first flexibility - work from anywhere in the UK
• Support with home office setup
• Share options - so you own a piece of what we’re building
• 1:1 coaching and therapy through Oliva
• Auto-enrolment into company pension scheme with Penfold
• Enhanced parental leave with up to 6 months at full pay
• Private medical insurance and life insurance (provided by Vitality and AIG respectively)
  
  

As a bank, we’re committed to maintaining the highest standards of security. This means that the successful candidate will need to complete background screening, and our offer will be conditional upon satisfactory review of these checks. This would include verification of right to work, criminal record, credit history, social media and professional reference checks.

How do I apply?

Are we your next move? Apply via the link below, if there's a match our Talent team will reach out to schedule an initial conversation and talk you through what happens next.

We’re remote-first

We have a small London office in Moorgate, but we are comfortable hiring people to work from anywhere in the UK. About a third of the company is based within occasional commuting distance of London, the rest are full-time remote.

Under representation

Our goal is for Griffin to proportionally represent the diversity of the working population in society. We’re working to ensure that Griffin is a supportive, empowering and inclusive environment for every member of our team — whatever your combination of race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, physical ability, nationality, neurodiversity, and religious beliefs. If you’re part of a group that is under-represented in fintech, we’d love to hear from you.

Griffin Bank Ltd request that recruitment agencies do not speculatively submit CVs to any employee or associate of our company unless explicitly asked to do so by a member of our Talent team.

Any CVs sent to any member of our team on a speculative basis will not be recognised and we will not accept liability for any fee or commission should we subsequently employ a candidate who applied to us directly or was introduced by an instructed agency that may also have been submitted speculatively by an uninstructed agency.