Principal Product Manager

About the Job

Lean is hiring a Principal Product Manager to own product for LeanX, our cross-border payments and stablecoin infrastructure business.

This is a startup inside a scale-up. LeanX is early, and you would be shaping it from close to day one: setting product direction, deciding what we build and in what order, and working directly with engineering to get it built. You would not be starting from zero. You would have Lean's infrastructure, licences, clients and leadership behind you.

Volume is growing quickly and our first large clients are going live. Today, much of what makes the business work is pushed through by hand by the leadership team. Your job is to turn that into a product the team can build, scale and defend. The hard problems here sit between regulation, engineering, product and commercial, so you need to be comfortable thinking across all four at once.

You will work as a member of the LeanX leadership team, and partner closely with our engineering team in Sarajevo and our commercial team in Dubai. Regular travel to both is expected.

About Lean

Lean is the leading financial infrastructure provider in the Middle East. We power some of the region's largest companies with APIs that enable payments, account verification, financial data access, and other critical financial infrastructure.

What started as the region's pioneering Open Banking platform and quickly became the de facto leader in account aggregation and payment initiation in the region is now becoming something bigger: a multi-product infrastructure company powering payments, data, and lending across MENA.

We've processed billions of dollars in transactions. We're trusted by 350+ clients - from Tabby and Tas'heel to Hungerstation - and backed by General Catalyst, Sequoia, and Shorooq. Our $67.5M Series B was just the beginning. We're expanding into new markets, opening offices, acquiring businesses, and building capabilities that didn't exist here before.

About LeanX: LeanX is Lean's cross-border and stablecoin business. Our clients are remittance companies, exchange houses and businesses moving money across borders, mostly for person-to-person remittance and business payouts. LeanX operates under Lean's regulated entities and is built by a dedicated engineering team in Sarajevo.

Responsibilities

Product strategy and leadership

• Own product strategy for LeanX across all its product lines: what we build, why, and in what order.
• Turn strategy into clear specs, priorities and roadmaps the engineering team can execute against.
• Make the call when priorities change, with a clear view of the team's capacity and the trade-offs involved.
• Help shape LeanX's long-term strategy and communicate it across the company.

Cross-border payments platform

• Build a cross-border platform that can compete with the leading global payout networks.
• Make it scale: more volume, more clients and more corridors without rebuilding each time. Launching a new corridor should be a repeatable process, not a project.
• Automate treasury operations (pre-funding, liquidity, FX and reconciliation) so they no longer depend on people moving money by hand.
• Define the technical infrastructure a cross-border platform needs, and guide engineering to build it.
• Make it easy for clients to integrate and go live: APIs, documentation, sandbox and onboarding.
• Treat regulation, licensing and partner coverage as part of the product, so the platform is defensible.

Stablecoin-native infrastructure

• Own the roadmap for stablecoin infrastructure: wallets as a service, on-ramps and off-ramps, stablecoin acceptance and stablecoin payouts.
• Help decide which adjacent opportunities to pursue and when, and say no to the ones that would distract us.

Connecting Lean and LeanX

• Make sure LeanX builds on Lean's core infrastructure where it should, rather than rebuilding what already exists.
• Keep one clean platform across stablecoin and fiat, across licences and across product lines as it grows.
• Bring ways of working closer together across the two teams.

Working with commercial and engineering

• Be the first stop for product questions from clients, the commercial team and the wider company, so engineers can focus on building.
• Work with commercial on the pipeline: what each client needs to go live and what that means for volume.
• Set up automation for routine coordination. This is not a ticket-and-follow-up job.

What we're looking for

• 8+ years in product management, including senior ownership of B2B or infrastructure products.
• Experience in cross-border payments, remittance, payouts, treasury, or stablecoin and digital asset infrastructure.
• Strong technical fluency: comfortable with APIs, system design conversations and the trade-offs engineers face.
• A track record of taking products from early stage to scale, ideally in a startup or new business line.
• Comfort working in regulated environments and treating compliance and licensing as product inputs.
• Clear, concise written communication. You write the specs and strategy documents yourself.
• Experience working with distributed engineering teams across time zones.
• High agency and good judgment under ambiguity.
• Experience in the GCC, South Asia or other emerging-market payment corridors is a plus.
• Experience building with AI tools to automate product and team workflows is a plus.
• Arabic is a plus.