Senior Product Manager

ABOUT KARAT

Karat started by building corporate cards and banking accounts for creators, the people you follow on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Twitch who run real businesses but were treated as an edge case by most financial providers. The same products fit a much wider set of businesses, and today we serve creators alongside the agencies, studios and growing companies that run the same way.

We've raised $70 million from Signal Fire, Union Square Ventures, Y Combinator, CRV and Coatue, alongside CEOs from YouTube, Twitter and Wealthfront and Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin. Our team comes from Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, earlier startups and the creator world itself, and we're headquartered in Los Angeles.

We decide who gets a card and how much credit, we hold customers' deposits, and we move their money. Every one of those decisions runs through a product, an internal tool, or a person on our operations team, and the product thinking behind them is what this role owns.

ABOUT THE ROLE

We're hiring a product manager to own the product thinking for the operational core of Karat: how a business applies, how we decide, and the internal tools our operations, compliance, and support teams use to review, approve, and serve customers. Your job is to make sure that by the time an engineer picks something up, the problem is framed, the edge cases are known, the design is reviewed, and operations and compliance have had their say.

The work spans both sides of the product. Internally, the tooling and automation that let a small operations team handle more volume with better decisions. Externally, the application and the card products people land on, including what happens when someone doesn't qualify for the one they wanted.

This is a builder PM role. You'll write the PRD, and you'll also build the clickable prototype before the design review, pull your own data, read the session recordings, and ship small things yourself with AI tools when waiting for an engineer would be slower than doing it. You'll work directly with the executive leadership team and with a small engineering team that moves fast and expects the thinking to be done when they pick something up.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

Own the product thinking end to end for your area: the problem statement, the PRD, the edge cases, the design review, and the launch, so that engineering picks up work that's ready to build. Run discovery with the people who do the work. Sit with operations and compliance while they review applications, read the support threads, watch the session recordings, and turn recurring friction into a ranked list: the few fixes that remove most of the pain. Prototype before you brief. Build clickable prototypes and working slices with AI tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Lovable, v0, or whatever you reach for) so reviews start from something real instead of a paragraph. Pull your own data. Write the SQL, define the metric before the feature ships, and report the result after. Put AI into operational workflows carefully: where automation should recommend and where it should decide, what the evals are, how an operator overrides it, and what gets logged. Prioritize from first principles. Inputs come from customers, partners, operations, and leadership; the roadmap comes from what moves throughput, risk, and customer trust. You'll say no clearly and in writing. Keep the loop with engineering tight: scope, sequence, cut, and unblock, so a two-week project takes two weeks. Hold internal tools to the same bar as customer-facing ones. The people using them all day deserve it, and it's where the throughput is. Write things down. Decisions, tradeoffs, and what we learned, in a form that engineers, operations, and the exec team can act on without a meeting.

WHAT YOU'LL NEED

4+ years in product management, or the equivalent as a founder or an engineer who owned the product decisions, at a company where there was nobody to