Product Lead
Remote · UAE contract · UK hours overlap required · Fintech · Core Product Team
Who we are
Sumara builds and delivers the next generation of financial services.
We create outsized returns through hands-on delivery of designed solutions. We bring together strategy, product, design, engineering and data to solve the hardest problems in financial technology. We work as one accountable team, and own outcomes rather than outputs.
We are leading the transformation with one of the UK’s largest financial services firms; a global trading platform with ambitions far beyond its current business. We are reshaping how it develops products, creates value, builds technology and uses data to make decisions. You will be embedded as a product leader within that transformation.
What this is
We are hiring product leaders across a range of seniority, and we calibrate scope to the person. You might own a product for a single squad, or run multiple squads operating across products. If you bring the experience, you own an entire domain and work directly alongside the Product Director on platform-level decisions.
The domains on the table: accounts and cards, crypto, investments, and trading. All of them sit inside one unified financial platform being built over a large legacy trading estate, which means every product decision carries real integration constraints and real trade-offs.
Whatever the scope, the job is the same: turn strategy and customer evidence into shipped products. Scope decisions, requirements, sequencing, and the definition of done. You own the “what” and the “why,” and you defend both in the room with senior engineers.
Why this role is rare
Engineering squads move fast, but speed without product judgment produces the wrong thing quickly. You are not a passive requirements-taker waiting for a roadmap to be handed down. You are an active, vocal participant in ceremonies. Talk to backend developers, challenge scope, cut features that do not serve the target customer, demand evidence before commitment, and hold the line on quality. You will pave the road for others to follow you.
The starting state
You are stepping into a high-velocity environment experiencing significant transformation. Customer research has defined who we are building the product for. You will bridge the gap between executive strategy and what a squad ships in the next sprint, turning direction into decisions the team actually acts on.
What you own
Scope scales with seniority, but ownership within your scope is total:
- Product direction: what gets built, in what order, and why. You translate platform strategy and customer evidence into a sequenced backlog the team believes in.
- Requirements and scope: you write the specs, define acceptance criteria, and make the cut-line calls when timelines compress.
- Trade-off decisions: latency vs simplicity, wrap vs rebuild, ship now vs ship right. You make these calls explicitly and document the reasoning.
- Delivery quality: you are accountable for what reaches production, not just what enters the sprint.
At domain level, you additionally own the domain strategy, its metrics, and its alignment with the other pillars of the platform.
What you drive in partnership
- Discovery and validation: you work with research and data to pressure-test assumptions before they become commitments, and you kill your own ideas when the evidence says so.
- Cross-squad coherence: your services connect to identity, accounts, and market-facing features owned by other teams. You align interfaces and dependencies without losing ownership of your own scope.
- Instrumentation and measurement: you partner with data to define success metrics per feature and ensure telemetry is part of the definition of done before code ships.
- Design collaboration: you work with designers as equal partners, framing problems clearly and protecting the simplicity of the end experience.
How you operate
You are an active voice in engineering ceremonies. You promote a culture of evidence over opinion where it previously didn’t exist. You use AI and modern product workflows to automate documentation, analysis, and QA overhead, freeing you up to focus on judgment and strategy.
What success looks like
- Your teams ship against a sequenced plan that traces back to customer evidence and platform strategy, not stakeholder noise.
- Scope decisions are made fast, documented, and rarely reversed for reasons that were knowable at the time.
- Engineering leadership trusts your calls enough to move without escalation.
- Evidence-first product practice becomes the default across squads, not an afterthought.
What we are looking for
Required:
- 6+ years in product, working directly alongside software engineering squads in fintech, trading, payments, or adjacent domains. Scope and title will be calibrated to your experience.
- Hands-on ownership of shipped products at system level: you understand APIs, event-driven services, and migration constraints well enough to make good decisions and challenge engineering assumptions.
- Track record of owning outcomes, not features: activation, retention, funding rates, revenue, not just shipped tickets.
- Strong written product practice: specs, decision docs, and trade-off records that teams actually use.
- Comfort operating without a mature process. You will help define it.
Strong signal:
- Direct experience in one of our domains: accounts and cards, crypto, investments, trading, or fintech checkout and payments.
- Experience in multi-product fintech or trading platforms dealing with legacy tech migrations.