Product Lead, Card Issuing

About us

We’re Littlepay - a growing fintech headquartered in Melbourne with operations in the UK, EU, LATAM, USA, and Australia. Our payments platform enables our customers to pay for public transport using any payment card, mobile wallet, or wearable device. Processing over USD 1 billion a year in 19 countries and continuing to expand globally, we’re proud to move more people through better payment experiences.

The challenge:

Public transit operators and agencies that work with Littlepay, currently rely on proprietary smart cards (closed-loop) to manage critical programs like corporate travel entitlements (e.g. employer loaded pre-paid travel) and concessionary travel (e.g., discounted or free student passes). These legacy systems are often costly and lack flexibility.

Littlepay is seizing the opportunity to deliver the next generation of transit payment solutions. We are developing a new card issuing product built on established bank card issuing standards. This innovation will displace proprietary smart card programs, allowing agencies to issue modern, flexible cards that meet the specific needs of the transit industry while significantly lowering operational complexity and cost. Our direction is to partner with established fintech platforms in the BaaS, CaaS and embedded finance ecosystems to deliver a world class implementation without long development cycles.

About the Opportunity

This role is open to candidates residing in London or on the US East Coast.

At Littlepay, our mission is to move more people through better payment experiences. This drives our passion to make payment journeys effortless, whether in-person via contactless physical or digital cards or online via web and mobile checkouts. Our Product team is central to achieving this ambitious vision.

As the Product Lead for Littlepay’s Issuing offering, you will define and drive the strategy for this new product from inception through to market launch. This role combines strategic ownership with hands-on execution. You will spend your time engaging externally with customers and partners to understand their needs and co-design solutions, while also collaborating internally with Commercial and Product teams to shape roadmaps, refine requirements, and ensure alignment across the business. The measure of your success will be simple and transparent: the launch of card programs that displace the proprietary smart cards in public transit.  

Key Responsibilities

• Running workshops with Littlepay customers to understand uses-cases for card issuing currently being serviced through smart-card (closed loop) programs
• Designing end-to-end user journeys as the basis of a minimum viable open-loop Issuing product
• Establishing and negotiating new commercial models in the prepaid ecosystem appropriate for the transit use case. Validating the commercial and technical viability of the proposition with customers
• Evaluating alternative platforms that can be leveraged to accelerate a Littlepay Issuing product offering, and minimise the need for development
• Collaborate with customers to deploy a number of POC Issuing programs that can evolve to full 
• Optimising customer onboarding, card lifecycle management, and operational workflows in collaboration with compliance and  support teams
• Ensuring all product features and processes meet relevant regulatory and scheme compliance requirements
• Work cross functionally with our internal teams to define, build, deploy and commercialise products that delight our customers
• Devise strategy, product roadmap, and oversee execution of initiatives to grow and expand from initial pilot programs to a global product

About you

Ideally, you'll have:

• 10+ years as a product manager
• 5+ year experience in the card issuing ecosystem, preferably in a modern fintech with a platform and API products
• Strong understanding of card issuing (prepaid, debit, credit), BIN sponsorship, card processing, and network (Visa, Mastercard) requirements.
• Strong working knowledge of card scheme requirements, issuer processor integrations, and compliance frameworks (KYC, AML, PCI-DSS, PSD2)
• Experience leading cross-team initiatives from ideation to execution
• Technical expertise: You’ve led technical products and/or have a background in computer science (or similar)
• Experience building both new products (0->1) as well as a track record of shipping continuous product improvements to an existing product portfolio
• Entrepreneurial determination to ensure that your product is successful
• Strong written and verbal communication skills

Our Benefits

We love to look after our people. At Littlepay, you'll be part of an inclusive and diverse team that celebrates the differences and unique gifts we each bring to work.

You’ll have access to:

• A high trust working environment, with access to cloud collaboration tools like Notion, Slack, Miro, Google Workspace, and Jira to help us work together effectively
• Paid professional development (including conferences, courses, learning subscriptions, etc.)
• Harrison Assessments - our talent management provider that facilitates continuous professional development
• A variety of flexible leave options
• A company-wide paid day off
• Flexible (hybrid) working conditions
• Health insurance via our provider Vitality
• UK pension additional contribution split
• Wellbeing support- including a free School of Life subscription for all employees, and counselling via the School of Life (UK) or our EAP program (Australia)
• Our generous employee referral program
• Mid-year, quarterly, and end-of-year corporate and team events and workshops

In-office expectations

At Littlepay, we believe great work happens when we solve problems, together. We see in-person collaboration as an important way to build connections, share ideas, and support each other meaningfully.

For those assigned to an office location, we generally expect a minimum two-day presence in the office each week. This may vary depending on your role, team, and location. For example, our team in Luxembourg works 4 days from the office, whereas our AU and UK teams currently work a minimum of 2 days onsite in our Melbourne/London offices. Some positions might require more frequent office attendance to support cross-functional collaboration, customer engagement, or specific team workflows. Your hiring manager will provide details relevant to your role.

We aim to strike a healthy balance between in-person connection and flexibility, while staying connected to deliver with speed and agility as we continue to scale, ensuring our ways of working support both our people and our shared ambition to move more people through better payment experiences.

Our recruitment process

If you’ve been shortlisted for the role, you’ll first have a chat with our Talent team, who will set up an interview if the stars align. A short workplace preferences questionnaire will also be sent to help us learn more about the way you prefer to work. Following a successful first interview, you’ll meet with a second set of Littlepay folks, and be invited to participate in the final stage before being presented with an offer.

If you have any questions regarding the recruitment process or if you require any accommodations for any stage in the interview process, please don’t hesitate to let us know. Additionally, if you don’t meet all of the criteria (we know that some underrepresented groups tend to avoid applying if they don’t), please still apply. We really enjoy meeting people who might bring a fresh perspective on a problem we need to solve!

Ultimately, being part of our small but mighty team means you'll have the opportunity to learn about micropayments, and have a hand in the provision of services that impact millions of people. You’ll help us deliver on our revolutionary product roadmap and help scale our platform as we continue to expand across the globe.

If this opportunity interests you, hit apply! We look forward to learning about you.