Lead product planning and execution for alternative-investment infrastructure: write detailed specs, coordinate partners, compliance, and engineering, own QA and sprint lifecycle, and ensure partner-ready deliveries.
Quick Facts
Role: Product Manager
Location: 5 days/week in NYC (Wall St office)
Compensation: $150k–$200k + equity
About the Role
You'll be the connective tissue between business strategy and engineering execution at Monark. Monark's infrastructure handles the entire lifecycle of alternative investments, from primary issuance through secondary market trading - all delivered via API to the brokerages, wealth management platforms, and custodians where millions of investors already manage their portfolios. As a PM at Monark, you'll own the translation of business requirements, regulatory needs, and partner feedback into clearly scoped, execution-ready specs that keep our engineering team building with speed and confidence.
This role lives at the intersection of product, partners, and process. You'll develop deep domain expertise in your assigned business line and become the context hub that aggregates information across partners, compliance, sales, and our technical team into a clearly defined plan. PMs at Monark build a nuanced understanding of the business and regulatory landscape, and take pride in understanding every detail of how a product works end to end, and channel that knowledge into specs that let engineers ship high-quality product quickly.
What You'll Do
Own the spec. Write detailed product requirements: user flows, acceptance criteria, business logic, edge cases, and clear scoping of what's required and what's not. The goal is to provide the engineering team with specs that require little to no clarification.
Be the context hub. Aggregate information across partner conversations, compliance and legal requirements, vendor capabilities, and our existing product surface. Distill it into concise, clearly scoped product plans that give engineers full business and strategic context alongside functional direction.
Develop deep domain expertise. Become the subject matter expert in your assigned business line. Understand the regulations, market mechanics, fund structures, vendor ecosystems, and partner-specific quirks inside and out. You should be the person in the room who can explain why something works the way it does, not just what we're building.
Insulate your teammates from thrash. Absorb business-side volatility so the engineering team stays focused on the roadmap. Know when to turn on a dime and when to push back, always grounded in a first-principles understanding of what the business actually needs.
Own QA end-to-end. Test every release against your spec. Verify that acceptance criteria are met, edge cases are handled, and nothing ships to upper environments unless it's functionally correct and partner-ready.
Manage the sprint lifecycle. Prepare tickets in stack-ranked priority order with clear dependencies. Coordinate sprint planning, maintain roadmap alignment, unblock your teammates as quickly as possible, and keep the broader team aligned and updated on progress.
Collaborate directly with partners. Work with Monark's clients throughout the implementation lifecycle: scope requirements, answer questions, coordinate feature releases with sales, and build trust as a knowledgeable counterpart on how our platform works.
Keep engineers engaged. Provide the business context behind every ticket so engineers understand the impact of their work. Share updates on released features. Operate with care and respect for your team.
What We're Looking For
- 5+ years of product management experience, with time spent in fintech, financial services, or capital markets
- Deep curiosity about alternative investments and the mechanics of how financial products are structured, distributed, and traded. You want to understand the full picture, not just your slice of it
- Ability to write clear, thorough product specs. User stories, acceptance criteria, business rules, and edge cases that engineers can execute against with minimal questions
- Comfortable reading API documentation and understanding technology at a conceptual level; prior experience as a software engineer is a plus
- Strong communication skills. You're as comfortable discussing a partner integration on a sales call as you are scoping requirements with the engineering team. Speaking with external stakeholders is a key part of this role.
- Comfort with hands-on QA and functional testing as a core part of your daily workflow
You'll Stand Out If You Have
- Direct experience with alternative assets, private fund structures, or financial market trading mechanics
- Prior experience as a founder or player-coach PM at an early-stage company
- Background in registered funds, broker-dealer operations, or wealth management platform integrations
- Familiarity with tools like Claude Code, Figma, and similar AI-assisted product development workflows
Who You Are
You're deeply curious. You don't just want to know what to build, you want to understand why it matters, how the money moves, what the regulatory constraints are, and what the partner is actually trying to accomplish. You take pride in knowing the details.
You're a builder at heart. When you see a business problem, an inefficiency, or a partner request, your instinct is to relentlessly chase the solution, not wait for others to instruct you to do so.
You're technically conversant. You can read an API contract, follow a data flow, and have a productive conversation with an engineer about system behavior, even if you're not writing the code yourself.
You're an effective communicator. You write clearly and concisely. You're equally comfortable presenting to partners, aligning internally with leadership, and breaking down complex requirements into actionable tickets. Clear communication spans across both written and verbal comms.
You're results-driven and fast-moving. You ship high-quality specs efficiently, holding yourself to the same standard you hold the engineering team to. You pride yourself on leaving no questions unanswered, all edge cases considered, and QA that leaves nothing to question.
CompensationThe base pay range for this role is $150,000 – $200,000 per year.
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