Product Manager - New Vertical (ex-founder or ex-private equity)

Join an early-stage startup.
Accelerate economic opportunity.

Join us to build Kovo's next vertical. You'll take one new consumer financial product from zero to one: help choose it, design it, build the first version, launch it, and own where it goes next. You'll work directly with the founders and with the person who runs legal and compliance.

This role is a good fit if:

• You've founded a company, or were one of its first engineers, and you built the product yourself. Or you started in private equity or investing, then joined a fintech early and built a business line.

• Your first prototype is working code, not a deck.

• You understand finance deeply, and you treat unit economics as part of product design, not a finance review at the end.

• You'd rather design a product that needs fewer licenses than staff up to manage more of them.

• You want to run a business line, not manage a backlog.

• Kovo is expanding access to financial tools for people historically excluded from the traditional credit system. We believe everyone deserves the opportunity for economic independence, and we're building products that help people establish financial identity and unlock opportunity.

• Over the past three years, Kovo has grown revenue 20x while maintaining exceptional capital efficiency. We rank above the 99th percentile in revenue per employee benchmarks, reflecting the leverage of a small, high-performing team.

• The team combines the ambition of a venture-scale company with the discipline of a profitable business. We reached positive free cash flow early in our lifecycle, allowing us to grow with less dilution and focus on building for the long term.

• Kovo is backed by Inspired Capital and Homebrew, and built by alumni from Plaid, Experian, Equifax, TransUnion, Innovis, Chime, Robinhood, Cash App, Honey, Possible, Monzo, Mercury, and more. We're looking for exceptional people to help us scale the company another 20x and beyond.

• Direct impact on millions of people's ability to access credit

• High ownership with minimal bureaucracy

• Speed, learning, and impact are core values

• Roles and priorities evolve quickly

• Some systems and processes are still being built

• The pace of execution and career growth is intense (not optimized for work-life balance)

What we're building

• Kovo is shifting from one product to many. The next vertical serves the same people we serve today: people who are low-income, subprime, or underserved by traditional finance.

• The founders choose which vertical we build. You help us choose by prototyping the front-runners and putting real numbers on them. Then you build, launch, and scale it.

Where your time goes

• Before the pick: prototypes, customer conversations, unit economics models and partner research.

• After the pick: design the smallest-footprint version with legal and compliance, build it, and launch it to a slice of our existing customers.

• After launch: set the vertical's ambitious north star, roadmap and quarterly plans, and hit them.

Find the vertical

• Prototype candidate verticals in our sandbox environments and test them with real customers.

• Model CAC payback, loss rates and margin for each candidate.

• Bring the founders a clear recommendation and the evidence behind it.

Design it small

• Work with legal and compliance on the version that delivers the customer outcome with the fewest licenses and obligations.

• Reuse what Kovo already has wherever you can: identity, payments, credit reporting and our customer base.

Build and ship it

• Ship the first version yourself: customer flows, integrations, events and experiments. Use agents heavily.

• Partner with backend engineering on the ledger, money movement and anything else that touches funds.

• Bring in design for polish and frontend engineering for implementation.

Run it

• Own the vertical's metrics: conversion, losses, payback and retention.

• Own the technical side of partner and vendor integrations.

• Design the cross-sell offer between this vertical and the credit builder vertical.

What you won't do

• Write tickets for someone else to build or do what you could build or do yourself.

• Groom a backlog.

• Write a PRD when a prototype would answer the question faster.

• Manage engineers' time. Engineering owns its own plans; you build alongside them.

Mindset

• You want to build a business. The idea of standing up a regulated consumer product yourself is why you'd take this job.

• Energized by expanding financial access for millions of underserved people.

• Comfortable in a high-intensity, remote role with full ownership and little scaffolding.

• You hate AI slop. You use agents heavily and hold their output to a higher bar than your own.

How you work

• Prototype first, before or alongside writing the one page that explains it.

• Clear, short writer. People act on your message after one read.

• You pull your own numbers in SQL and product analytics.

Experience

• One of these two paths: (1) Founder, co-founder, or founding engineer who owned a product end to end. (2) Private equity, growth equity, credit investing or strategic finance, then an early operator role at a fintech where you built a business line.

• You've taken a consumer product from zero to one.

• Consumer fintech experience in lending, payments, cash advance, banking, cards, or similar.

• You've worked inside a bank or lending partnership program.

• Bonus: You've shipped production code recently, in TypeScript, React, or similar. AI-assisted counts.

You report to one of the founders, based in Austin, TX. We are fully remote. Austin is a plus, not a requirement.

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