Product Manager - Customer & Accounts Platform

Job Description

The Customer and Accounts platforms are the spine of the Core Banking Platform. The Customer Platform holds the Bank’s single, deduplicated view of every person and organisation we deal with. The Accounts Platform is the layer every system in the Bank goes through to create and service accounts on Thought Machine Vault Core. Every other platform, franchise and squad depends on both.

This role owns the product agenda across the two. You will run a single roadmap, own the API contracts other teams build against, and define how these platforms behave to the level of precision an engineer can build from: how a customer is matched, merged and maintained, how accounts are created and move through their lifecycle, how instructions and events flow to and from Vault Core, and what happens at every boundary and edge case in between.

It is a deliberately deep, hands-on platform role for someone who is energised rather than daunted by data models, API versioning, idempotency and failure modes, and who is comfortable that their users are other engineering teams rather than end customers.

Roadmap & Initiative Definition

• Own a single product roadmap across the Customer and Accounts platforms, sequenced against franchise commercial priorities, Core Banking Programme commitments and the platform’s delivery capacity.
• Balance platform reliability, new capability and migration work in one plan, and make the trade-offs between them explicit rather than letting the loudest demand set the order.
• Run discovery with the squads and franchises that depend on the platform, establishing the underlying customer and business need, the platform behaviour it implies, and whether the platform can support it.
• Convert consumer demand into well-formed initiatives with a clear problem statement, scope, dependencies and definition of success, so the squad has a credible, prioritised pipeline of work.
• Take on the problems that are too large or too cross-cutting for any single product squad to own, the ones that only become solvable when one platform holds the whole picture.
• Own migration and decommissioning planning for legacy customer and account infrastructure, including how records are matched, moved, reconciled and proven correct.
• Bring a point of view. Where a request is poorly formed, unaffordable or better solved elsewhere in the estate, say so early and propose the alternative.

Product Definition on the Platform

• Own how the Customer Platform behaves — matching, merge and deduplication rules, what constitutes the golden record, how customer data is maintained and corrected, and the downstream consequences of any change to that record — including configuration and the rationale behind every parameter choice.
• Own how the Accounts Platform behaves — account creation, lifecycle states and closure, how instructions reach Vault Core, and how posting and event behaviour is exposed back to consuming systems.
• Treat the platform API surface as a product in its own right: own its definition, versioning and documentation, so every consuming system has stable contracts to build against and no consumer is surprised by a change.
• Set the standards for how other squads integrate with the platform, covering integration patterns, idempotency, error handling and testing, and make sure they are understood and followed.
• Translate consumer needs, regulatory obligations and platform constraints into unambiguous requirements, with user stories and acceptance criteria covering happy path, unhappy path, boundary and invalid-input cases.
• Decide whether a need is met by configuration, new platform capability, or a change in the consuming system, and make the trade-off explicit rather than defaulting to build.
• Build in the controls the Bank needs from the outset: FCA and Consumer Duty outcomes, accuracy and lineage of customer and account data, auditable behaviour, and correct treatment under financial crime and data protection obligations.
• Grow the Customer Platform as the Bank’s single source of truth for who we deal with, rather than one more system holding a partial view.
• Make each new product and franchise faster and lower-effort to launch by building reusable capability rather than one-off integrations.
• Review implemented behaviour against requirements alongside engineers, and own product sign-off through test and UAT.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Work day to day with the engineers on the platform squad, not just their leadership, in refinement, in design discussions and in defect triage. The quality of this working relationship is the single biggest determinant of success in the role.
• Partner with the franchise and product squads that consume the platform, and hold the line on platform integrity under delivery pressure, balancing franchise urgency against consistent, scalable foundations.
• Work with Operations to understand how customers and accounts are actually onboarded and serviced, and bring that reality into platform decisions.
• Engage Finance, Data, Legal and Risk & Compliance early, so reporting needs, regulatory change and control expectations shape requirements rather than arriving as late constraints.
• Communicate platform and integration decisions in plain language to non-technical stakeholders, and in exacting detail to engineers. Both audiences should recognise the same decision.
• Use data to understand platform performance, and present roadmap and strategy to senior leadership, including the quarterly Technology Platform Playback attended by the CTO.

Interfaces & Boundaries

• The Product Lead, Core Banking Platform owns cross-book demand consolidation, investment business cases and prioritisation. This role supplies the platform substance those business cases rest on.
• The Vault Platform Product Manager owns the Vault implementation across the Bank and all product lines on it. This role owns the customer and account layer in front of it, and the two agree the seam between platform behaviour and product behaviour rather than each assuming it.
• Product Managers for each lending product line own their own product definition on Vault Core. This role owns the shared customer and account capability underneath them, and escalates cross-product-line trade-offs rather than resolving them locally.
• The Core Banking Delivery Lead and Engineering Manager own delivery sequencing and capacity. This role owns what is being built and why, and whether what was built is right.
• Data owns the Bank’s data architecture and governance. This role owns the customer record as a product and works within that architecture.

Qualifications

Essential

• Strong product management experience across the full lifecycle, from discovery through delivery and into live running.
• Experience of platform, API-first or infrastructure products, where your users are other engineering teams rather than end customers, including ownership of API definition, versioning and documentation.
• Strong core product management craft: discovery, framing the problem before the solution, roadmap definition, and making and defending prioritisation trade-offs with competing stakeholders.
• Experience defining requirements for engineering teams, including acceptance criteria at a level of detail that removes ambiguity.
• Comfortable operating at a low level of abstraction in a technically complex, regulated environment, and able to reason about how components integrate, where data flows between them, and how they fail.
• Able to hold the line on platform integrity under delivery pressure, balancing franchise urgency against consistent, scalable foundations.
• Experience in financial services, ideally across core banking, accounts, lending or customer data.
• Uses data to drive decisions, able to interrogate system output directly, understand platform performance, and ground prioritisation in evidence rather than stakeholder volume.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, and the credibility to work as a peer with engineers and with senior business stakeholders up to ExCo.
• Agile working practices and fluency in Jira and Confluence.
• Precision and intellectual honesty. This role should be prepared to challenge a design, escalate an unresolved decision, and say “we don’t know yet” rather than paper over a gap.

Desirable

• Direct experience of Thought Machine Vault Core, including its API surface and posting mechanics.
• Experience of customer data management: matching and merge, golden record or master data management.
• Familiarity with domain-driven design or event-driven architecture.
• Experience of migrating off and decommissioning legacy platforms, including data migration and reconciliation.
• Understanding of the system landscape around customer and accounts: origination, servicing, payments, collections and data.
• A track record of using AI to improve journeys and ways of working.

Additional Information

Your Wellbeing - We take your health and well-being very seriously by providing a range of benefits to give you and your family peace of mind. These include:

• Market leading family friendly policies such as access to our Maternity, Adoption and Paternity policies from Day 1 of your employment
• Free access to Headspace, a mindfulness & meditation digital health app
• Free access to Peppy digital health app that offers personalised support through fertility treatment becoming a parent or menopause
• EAP (Employee Assistance Programme) - Offering you support on a wide range of subjects including financial concerns, mental wellbeing and more general queries around family, work, housing, and health
• Cycle to work scheme
• Discounts on gym membership
• Contributory pension scheme & death in service

Your Lifestyle - It’s important you strike the right balance between your work and personal life. We provide benefits to support you when at work and when you’re enjoying your leisure time.

• Minimum of 27 days holiday per year
• Option to buy or sell holiday days through our flexi-holiday scheme
• Discounts on gym membership nationwide
• Access to discounts on a range of high street and online brands
• Community support and charitable giving

Your Contribution - We’re focused on rewarding those that go the extra mile in helping us achieve our goals.

• Participation in our annual discretionary bonus scheme designed to reward your contribution to our success
• Proudly Shawbrook recognition scheme focused on recognising our role models and thanking our colleagues for a job well done