Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Payments infrastructure is a reliability-sensitive corner of SaaS, where uptime, correctness, and incident handling directly shape customer trust and downstream business outcomes. This Staff Technical Program Manager remit sits at that intersection, coordinating quality and reliability across multiple systems and teams in a platform that supports many payment methods and use cases. The listing signals a company operating at meaningful scale, where reliability programs need to be formalized and measured rather than handled ad hoc.
For a SaaS career, the standout value is ownership of cross-functional mechanisms that mature an organization’s operating model: production readiness reviews, SLO/SLI definition, incident management, and observability-driven feedback loops. These are durable competencies across SaaS categories, especially as products expand into more integrations, higher transaction volumes, and stricter customer expectations. The role also builds influence skills that matter in SaaS—driving alignment without direct authority, translating technical risk into prioritization, and creating repeatable governance that improves delivery outcomes.
This role fits practitioners who prefer systems thinking over single-team execution and who enjoy building structure in ambiguous spaces. It will suit someone comfortable moving between engineering depth and program leadership, and who is motivated by measurable improvements in reliability rather than feature throughput alone.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
Company Description
At PayNearMe, we’re on a mission to make paying and getting paid as simple as possible. We build innovative technology that transforms the way businesses and their customers experience payments. Our industry-leading platform, PayXM™, is the first of its kind—designed to manage the entire payment experience from start to finish. Every click, swipe or tap is seamless, fast and secure, helping non-commerce businesses boost customer satisfaction, accelerate payments, and reduce costs.
Our single platform handles it all: cards, ACH, digital wallets such as PayPal, Venmo, Cash App Pay, Apple Pay and Google Pay, and even cash at more than 62,000 retail locations nationwide. Today, thousands of businesses across consumer lending, iGaming and online sports betting, property management, and tolling trust PayNearMe to deliver a payment experience that drives real results.
In September 2025, we raised a $50 million Series E funding round to accelerate our growth.
We’re a team of 200+ employees across 41 states, headquartered in Silicon Valley with satellite offices in Dallas, TX and Holmdel, NJ.
Join us and be part of a team that’s shaping the future of payments—one experience at a time.
Job Description
We're looking for an experienced, technical Staff-level Technical Program Manager (TPM) to lead our Quality and Reliability efforts across critical systems and services. This is a high-impact, individual contributor role for someone who has done this before, who can build structure where needed, navigate ambiguity, and drive outcomes across multiple teams and domains.
You’ll be responsible for leading cross-functional programs to improve system reliability, scalability, and operational quality, from improving incident response and production readiness to redefining the ways we test and deploy software. This is not a generalist role: we’re looking for a TPM with deep technical fluency and a track record of shaping system-level quality and delivery culture at scale.
Responsibilities
- Own the Quality & Reliability Program: Define and drive the vision for quality—across proactive practices (testing, deployment, observability), reactive processes (incident response, external communications), and cultural expectations (quality ownership, readiness)
- Lead Cross-Functional Programs: Drive reliability and quality initiatives across Engineering, Product, Operations, and Customer Success
- Production Readiness: Own the Production Readiness Review (PRR) process; ensure all releases meet reliability standards before they go live
- Define and Drive SLOs: Establish and track Service Level Objectives (SLOs). Build visibility into reliability metrics and lead efforts to meet or exceed targets
- Improve Incident Management: Streamline incident response and postmortems. Drive structural improvements in tooling, communication, and ownership
- Scale Tooling & Automation: Collaborate across teams to enhance observability, alerting, testing automation, and response tooling
- Mitigate System Risk: Identify risk vectors early, build mitigation plans, and drive resolution with urgency
- Drive Alignment: Influence across Eng, Product, Ops, and GTM teams to prioritize reliability and integrate quality into every initiative
- Track Progress: Use tools like Atlas, Jira, and internal dashboards to maintain clarity on goals, risks, and outcomes
- Embed Continuous Learning: Build programs that ensure we learn from every incident, test edge cases, and continuously harden our systems
Qualifications
- 8+ years of program management experience, with at least 3 years in technical, reliability, or quality-focused domains
- Strong understanding of system architecture, distributed systems, and reliability engineering principles
- Familiarity with SDLC models, CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, observability, and incident management tooling
- Demonstrated success defining and improving SLOs, SLIs, and production readiness processes.
- Proven ability to lead large-scale, cross-functional programs across Engineering, Product, Operations, and Customer Success
- Skilled at translating complex technical goals into clear, actionable, and measurable outcomes.
- Experienced in using Atlassian tools (e.g., Jira, Atlas) for program tracking, reporting, and executive communication
- Adept at navigating ambiguity, building alignment, and driving decision-making without formal authority
- Comfortable balancing technical depth with business priorities to influence outcomes.
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
- Bonus: Experience in regulated or high-availability industries such as fintech, healthcare, or infrastructure
Additional Information
Location: Flexible/Remote (within the US)
Great compensation package plus extensive benefits, including:
- 100% Remote (must be in US)
- Base salary per year (paid semi-monthly)
- Fast- paced and professional work culture
- Stock options with standard startup vesting - 1 year cliff; 4 years total
- $50 monthly communication expense stipend to go towards your phone/internet bill
- $250 stipend to enhance your WFH setup
- Reimbursement for peripheral equipment: monitor (up to $400), keyboard and mouse (up to $200)
- Premium medical benefits including vision and dental (100% coverage for employees)
- Company-sponsored life and disability insurance
- Paid parental bonding leave
- Paid sick leave, jury duty, bereavement
- 401k plan
- Flexible Time Off (our team members typically take off ~3-4 weeks per year)
- Volunteer Time Off
- 13 scheduled holidays
- 2x / year in-person team meet-ups (2-3 days, company paid)
Salary Range: $190,000 - 220,000
PayNearMe strives to create a workplace where all employees thrive. Our core values represent who we are today and we take pride in the way we work with each other as well as with our stakeholders.
We’re in this together to do the right thing. We deliver real results we are proud of while remaining respectful, transparent, and flexible.
PayNearMe is an equal opportunity employer. We are diligently and thoughtfully working towards cultivating a diverse workforce which in turn, enhances our products and services for the communities we serve. Applicants who represent all backgrounds are strongly encouraged to apply.
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Candidate information will be treated in accordance with our job applicant privacy notice found at: https://home.paynearme.com/ccpa-privacy-notice-jobs-employees/
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