Product Lead

Summary

Join GiveDirectly as a Product Lead, Cash Delivery Platform, and lead the development of a platform to enhance cash delivery to recipients. Define the long-term product vision, own the roadmap for platform capabilities, and make high-leverage prioritization decisions. Lead end-to-end product development, collaborating with engineers, field operations, and research teams. Align diverse stakeholders with competing priorities and ensure platform investments serve real program requirements. This is a new role requiring experience defining products from the ground up and creating clarity and scale from complex situations. The role is fully remote but requires overlap with an East Africa timezone and involves travel to program sites up to once per quarter.

Requirements

• Exceptional alignment to GD values, passion for our mission, and commitment to recipient dignity and empowerment
• We welcome and strongly encourage applications from candidates who have personal or professional experience in the low-income and/or historically marginalized communities that we serve
• 8+ years of technical software product management, including multiple full-lifecycle "zero-to-one" builds
• High technical fluency — you should be able to engage deeply with engineers on architecture, APIs, and system design
• High empathy for non-technical users and an eye for UX
• Experience in a high ambiguity, low-structure environment — you create clarity, not wait for it
• Ability to collaborate inclusively with stakeholders across varied social, national, and cultural backgrounds, including communicating technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Analytical problem solver: looks at problems with analytical and iterative mindset, with strong framework for prioritization

Responsibilities

• Define the long-term product vision for GiveDirectly’s cash delivery platform, cutting away historical complexity while building for future flexibility where needed
• Pair strong technical expertise with deep understanding of many users – including field officers, recipients, and technical program managers – to design the platform and its abstractions
• Own the roadmap for platform capabilities like survey tooling, eligibility and KYC, fraud detection, payments, and case management
• Make high-leverage prioritization decisions across multiple product lines and internal teams
• Define and track success metrics for the platform
• Lead end-to-end product development from problem discovery and user requirements gathering to launch and iteration, hand-in-hand with engineering
• Partner with engineers to define robust abstractions and platform boundaries – ask the right questions, internalize technical tradeoffs between approaches, and shape coherent, scalable product logic
• Align diverse technical and non-technical stakeholders with competing priorities
• Collaborate with programs product leads, technical program managers, engineering, operations, and field teams to ensure that platform investments serve real, validated program requirements

Preferred Qualifications

Experience working with users experiencing poverty, with low digital literacy, and/or low or no network connectivity

Benefits

• A positive and supportive team with opportunities for advancement
• A demonstrated commitment to helping all staff develop and grow
• A competitive salary, including bonus
• A robust health benefits plan (exact details will vary by country)
• Flexible paid time off
• Allowances for desk set-up and learning and development