Staff Product Engineer

Job title: Staff Product Manager

Reports to: Head of Innovation & Applied AI

Department: Technology Resource Group

Location: Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Grade: 21

About Priority Commerce:

Priority Commerce is a leading financial technology company on a mission to deliver a personalized, easy-to-adopt financial toolset that accelerates cash flow and optimizes working capital for businesses. Our vision is to eliminate the barriers to unlocking revenue - empowering businesses to grow faster and operate smarter.

We achieve this through the Priority Commerce Engine, an innovative platform that combines payables, acquiring, and banking and treasury solutions. This unified approach allows businesses to streamline financial operations, reduce unnecessary costs, and uncover new revenue opportunities.

At Priority Commerce, we're driven by results. We expect our people to be known for results - bringing expertise, momentum, and relentless focus to every challenge, helping our clients and each other thrive.

About Innovation Lab:

The Innovation Lab is a strategic engineering and product hub focused on the future of commerce, payments, and agentic product development here in the Waterloo region. We operate as an agile, hypothesis-driven team that treats initiatives as experiments - running a build-measure-learn loop against business reality and channeling our effort toward three value streams: new revenue streams (customer-facing AI and data products), business efficiency (productivity multipliers across the organization), and enhanced customer experience (across onboarding, support, and the full customer journey). The team is also exploring how AI changes the way product and engineering teams work, including agentic PDLC/SDLC workflows, AI-assisted requirements, story decomposition, and more efficient product execution.

About the Role:

As Senior Product Manager for the Innovation Lab, you will drive problem framing, prioritization, and execution for Priority Commerce Engine initiatives - taking a product-mindset approach that ties every initiative to a clear business problem and a measurable outcome. You will work closely with engineering, design, and cross-functional stakeholders to move product work through the Lab’s engagement process: from validated problem definition, through PRD and prioritization, into rapid prototyping, go/no-go validation, and transition to the teams that will own it long-term.

Responsibilities:

• Partner with stakeholders to define validated problem statements aligned with Innovation Lab value streams.
• Translate ambiguous ideas into structured PRDs with clear metrics, milestones, and Impact/Effort scores.
• Prioritize the Lab backlog via Impact/Effort scoring and maintain a transparent Now/Next/Later roadmap.
• Drive time-boxed delivery with engineering pods, iterating through rapid prototyping and feedback loops.
• Lead go/no-go checkpoints to align stakeholders, support funding, and pivot or stop experiments using evidence.
• Transition validated initiatives to operating product teams for long-term ownership.
• Collaborate with Partner Solutions to translate technical constraints into business and customer terms.
• Address developer experience friction (onboarding, docs, time-to-value) to guide engineering builds.
• Ensure launch readiness for customer deliverables like the embeddable component library for ISV adoption.
• Support pricing, GTM research, legal, and compliance alignment for upcoming launches. Implement Priority’s agentic PDLC workflows, leveraging AI-assisted requirements and decomposition.
• Apply a progressive, hands-on product mindset in a regulated fintech/payments setting.

What Success Looks Like:

This is a strong fit if you’re customer- and business-facing by instinct - you’d sit with a customer to understand their integration pain, and you’re comfortable moving between engineering conversations and pricing or GTM discussions in the same day. You’re energized by running lean experiments, following the evidence, and killing your own ideas when the data says so.

You should be energized by:

• Turning ambiguous business problems into clear problem statements, success metrics, and actionable requirements.
• Working in a hypothesis-driven way: framing initiatives as experiments and using a build-measure-learn loop to validate them against business reality.
• Prioritizing ruthlessly with Impact/Effort trade-offs and keeping a transparent Now/Next/Later roadmap.
• Turning a platform capability into something a third-party developer can actually adopt.
• Exploring how AI and agentic workflows can improve the way products are built and delivered.
• Thinking beyond features to the downstream impact on customers, operations, compliance, risk, and business outcomes.
• Understanding developer experience and integration friction well enough to advocate for it.
• Getting a product launch-ready (documentation, support readiness, pricing, and GTM), not just the build.
• Fast-moving fintech, payments, commerce, or other transactional software environments.
• Being part of a collaborative Waterloo team helping shape the future of product development.

Candidate Requirements:

• 5+ years of Product Management experience, preferably with developer-facing or integration-heavy products.
• Proven track record of delivering SaaS, transactional systems, or complex software.
• Experience with product discovery, PRDs, Impact/Effort prioritization, and agile roadmaps.
• Strong instincts for developer experience, documentation, and reducing integration friction.
• Ability to support pricing, positioning, and GTM strategy.
• Collaborative approach with legal, compliance, and operations on launch readiness.
• Exposure to payments, banking, or regulated financial systems.
• Experience utilizing AI agents or AI-assisted workflows in product development.
• Strong written communication skills to translate technical topics into business insights.
• Strong collaboration skills and sound business judgment.
• Skilled at framing ambiguous problems into clear metrics, constraints, and requirements.

Nice-to-Have:

• Experience within payments, banking, fintech, or other highly regulated technology environments.
• Hands-on experience incorporating AI agents into product workflows - discovery, requirements generation, QA, customer experience, observability, or other areas that improve product delivery and execution.
• Familiarity with prompt engineering, agent evaluation frameworks, observability tooling, and the practical challenges of deploying AI-powered solutions in regulated environments.
• A degree in Engineering, Computer Applications, Business, or a related field.

Work Environment & Culture:

We believe that performance and experience go hand in hand - an exceptional employee experience is earned through contribution. We are a results-driven team, grounded in our core values: ownership, authenticity, service, trust, innovation, and camaraderie.

Our culture is built for those who want to make an impact. We challenge each other to grow, celebrate progress, and support one another through shared goals and real connection. Whether you're building technology, serving clients, or supporting internal teams, you’ll be part of a company that empowers you to perform at your best and be known for results.

Compensation and Benefits:

Compensation range: $116k - $157k CAD

We invest in the whole employee - personally and professionally. Our benefits package is designed to support your well-being, growth, and success - both inside and outside of work.

Financial Wellness

• Bonus programs
• Financial wellness resources and employee discount programs

Health & Well-being

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage
• Mental health support for employees and dependents through Lyra Health
• Family planning and women’s health benefits through Carrot
• Gym membership reimbursement and virtual wellness programs (including yoga)

Time Off

• 3 weeks PTO to start, with unlimited PTO after year one

Growth & Development

• Education expense reimbursement
• Leadership development programs
• Certified Payments Professional (CPP) certification support

We believe great performance starts with feeling supported - and we’ve built our benefits with that in mind.

Traditional Physical Requirements:

• Requires prolonged sitting, standing, bending, stooping and stretching.
• Requires the ability to lift 10 pounds.
• Requires eye-hand coordination, manual dexterity and a normal range of hearing and vision (with or without correction).

Join our team at Priority Commerce and be part of a dynamic and innovative company that is transforming the financial technology landscape. Together, we can shape the future of payments and banking solutions while providing unmatched value to our clients.