Interim Product Lead - Payments/E-Commerce

My client, a major player in the e-commerce space are currently seeking a Product Manager/Product Lead with experience in Payments and Cloud Technology for a 6 month project, focusing on the support of technical teams delivering payment services to millions of users globally. This role can be done mainly remote, although preference will be given to those who are living within Berlin/Hamburg. Required key tasks; Defining the Payment Strategy and Roadmap: Aligning the product vision with business goals, such as increasing conversion rates, entering new geographic markets, or reducing processing costs (COGS).Managing Orchestration and Technical Architecture: Overseeing the "plumbing" of the payment stack. This includes managing the logic for routing transactions, handling redundant failovers to ensure high availability, and optimizing the checkout experience.Ensuring Compliance and Regulatory Alignment: Navigating the complex web of global financial regulations, such as PCI-DSS compliance, PSD3, KYC/AML standards, and local data residency laws to mitigate legal risks.Leading Stakeholder and Vendor Relationships: Managing critical partnerships with banks and third-party gateways (Stripe, Adyen, etc.).Driving Financial Reconciliation and Reporting: Ensuring that for every cent moved, there is a clear audit trail. This involves building automated systems for settlement, ledgering, and providing the finance team with accurate data for month-end closing.Technical understanding needed;System Architecture and API Design: You don't need to write the code, but you must understand how microservices communicate. A Lead needs to evaluate if an API is scalable, RESTful, and intuitive for third-party developers, as this directly impacts the speed of integrations.Data Modeling and Advanced Analytics: You should be proficient in SQL and comfortable navigating complex schemas. Beyond basic metrics, you need to understand data flows—how a user action transforms into a database entry and eventually a financial record—to identify bottlenecks or bugs.Security and Encryption Fundamentals: You must be conversant in the technical side of protection. This includes understanding tokenization, OAuth flows, and how to protect sensitive data (like PII or cardholder data) without degrading the user experience.Technical Troubleshooting and QA Methodologies: The ability to "read" logs (using tools like Splunk or Datadog) to understand why a system failed. You should be able to lead the technical post-mortem after an incident, asking the right questions about root causes and edge cases.Interviews are happening as soon as next week, and my client is looking to onboard someone as soon as possible. Ideally before April 1st. If you are interested, please send me an up to date CV and time to speak at your earliest convenience.