Senior Director of Product, Payments Acceptance

Toast creates technology to help restaurants and local businesses succeed in a digital world, helping business owners operate, increase sales, engage customers, and keep employees happy.

Toast is scaling fast and Payments is right at the center of that growth. We process over $200B annually on behalf of our customers. As we move into the next phase, the complexity of our payments platform, customer segments, and product surface area is increasing materially. We are looking for a leader who can lead the Payments Acceptance product organization. 

As Senior Director of Product, Payments Acceptance, you will be responsible for defining the strategy, platform architecture direction, and execution roadmap for Toast's payments acceptance stack. You will lead a high-performing product organization and partner deeply with engineering to deliver a fast, reliable, compliant, and cost-efficient platform powering Toast's core business.

This role is about platform thinking, strong people leadership, and strategic judgment in a high-stakes domain. You'll own the payments acceptance surface — from card-present to card-not-present, orchestration, optimization, and alternate payment experiences including agentic commerce. This is a rare opportunity to shape the future of payments at industry-leading scale.

This is a U.S. based remote role, partnering closely with engineering and product teams across the U.S., Ireland, and India.

A day in the life (Responsibilities) 

• Set Platform Strategy: Own the long-term vision for Toast's payment acceptance capabilities, drive the platform architecture direction required to support Toast's scale, reliability needs, and innovation roadmap.
• Drive Platform Modernization & Cost Optimization: Lead the multi-year roadmap for Toast's core payments platform. Own cost optimization, expanding payment rails and delivering world-class availability and reliability.
• Drive High-Impact Execution: Translate strategy into clear priorities and measurable outcomes for a multi-disciplinary, multi-region product and engineering organization. Anticipate and resolve strategic issues that impact delivery, stability, or regulatory posture.
• Shape the Future of Agentic Payments: Drive Toast's point of view on how autonomous agents will initiate, authorize, and complete payments on behalf of consumers and position Toast's platform to enable these experiences.
• Lead Through Influence: Champion cross-functional delivery across Product, Engineering, Design, Legal/Compliance, Hardware, Commerce, Risk, Finance, and Operations. Represent Payments Acceptance as a key leader in Toast's executive forums and vendor partner ecosystem.
• Build and Develop a World-Class Team: Hire, coach, and develop a world-class team of Product Managers across multiple regions. You lead a high-leverage team that punches well above its weight through engineering partnerships. Cultivate an operating model grounded in ownership, accountability, clarity, and exceptional execution.

What you'll need to thrive (Requirements)

Must-Have

• Payments Acquiring Depth: 15+ years of progressive Product Management experience, with deep expertise in payment acquiring and processing within a large-scale merchant, PSP, or fintech environment.
• Full-Stack Acceptance Knowledge: Extensive experience across card-present and card-not-present acceptance -  including EMV, contactless, routing, tokenization, and network rules.
• Platform Leadership at Scale: Proven ability to define and execute platform strategy, including modernization, orchestration, and cost optimization at high transaction volumes.
• People Leadership: Demonstrated success building, mentoring, and scaling high-performing product teams across geographic locations. Experience managing managers preferred.
• Regulatory Fluency: Strong understanding of U.S. payments regulations and network requirements (PCI, EMVCo, card brand rules).
• Executive Communication: Exceptional cross-functional influence and stakeholder management at the VP/C-suite level.

Strong Plus

• Fintech Builder Background: Experience at a high-growth payments or commerce platform where you built payments products from the ground up.
• Agentic Commerce Exposure: Curiosity and point of view on how autonomous agents will reshape payment acceptance — where consumers' AI agents initiate and complete purchases on their behalf.
• Technical Fluency: Track record of bridging business strategy and complex engineering domains — can go deep with architects and come back up to tell the story to executives.
• MS, MTech, or MBA

What this role is NOT

• This is not a "keep the lights on" role. You'll be expected to transform, not just maintain.
• This is not siloed. You'll be deeply embedded across Toast's product and business ecosystem.

AI at Toast

At Toast, one of our company values is that we're hungry to build and learn. We believe learning new AI tools empowers us to build for our customers faster, more independently, and with higher quality. We provide these tools across all disciplines, from Engineering and Product to Sales and Support, and are inspired by how our Toasters are already driving real value with them. The people who thrive here are those who embrace changes that let us build more for our customers; it’s a core part of our culture.

Our Total Rewards Philosophy

We strive to provide competitive compensation and benefits programs that help to attract, retain, and motivate the best and brightest people in our industry. Our total rewards package goes beyond great earnings potential and provides the means to a healthy lifestyle with the flexibility to meet Toasters’ changing needs. Learn more about our benefits at https://careers.toasttab.com/toast-benefits.