Head of Product — Founding Team

Head of Product — Founding Team

Full-Time | Raleigh/Durham, NC strongly preferred → In-office within 6–12 months

Stage: Seed Round | Reports to: Co-Founders | Works closely with: Outsourced Product

Compensation

$80,000–$105,000 base + founding-team equity (based on experience)

Impact Card is building a new category of financial infrastructure for mission driven institutions, turning everyday spending into a sustainable, recurring revenue stream for the organizations themselves. We're not another "sell seats" SaaS tool.

We're building the data and financial layer that gives our partners real time visibility into engagement across their extended community, insight that legacy systems simply can't provide.

We're moving fast: a signed flagship launch partner, a committed seed round in motion, a clear technical roadmap, and a strategic acquisition that's already put us at MVP. Now we need a product leader who can turn that roadmap into a shipped, working platform, someone just as comfortable in a planning meeting as they are debugging a broken integration at 11pm.

The Role

This is a builder's product role, not a traditional “roadmap-and-hand-off” Head of Product seat. You'll own the product vision and priorities, but you'll also be hands-on in the code and the systems when something breaks because at this stage, things will break, and you're the person people rely on to fix them.

You'll work closely with our technical advisory board and our outsourced/offshore engineering team to build and ship product, translating strategy into working software and keeping delivery on track day to day. This role has a clear, intentional path toward senior technical leadership as the team and platform scale — we want someone who joins to build long-term, not to pass through.

What You'll Own

1. Product Strategy & Roadmap

• Own the end-to-end product roadmap across the card platform, partner integration, and data/AI capabilities
• Translate partner needs and stakeholder feedback into clear, prioritized product requirements
• Balance long-term platform vision with the near-term reality of a seed-stage company shipping to a live launch partner
• Define success metrics and reporting for product performance across finance, advancement, and athletics use cases

2. Hands-On Execution

• Work directly in the product to scope, build, test, and ship features across the stack
• Be the first responder when something breaks in production — diagnose, fix, or coordinate a fix quickly
• Partner with external engineering and offshore development resources to keep delivery on schedule and on quality
• Get hands-on with the acquired fintech product to help take it from its current state to full launch and scale

3. Partner-Facing Product

• Own the client-facing portal experience: dashboards, reporting, and partner-facing workflows
• Work with IT/security and administrative stakeholders through implementation and security reviews
• Build a repeatable product model so new partners are configuration, not custom rebuilds

4. Team & Function Building

• Help define product process, hiring bar, and operating cadence as the company grows
• Begin identifying and hiring the first product/engineering team members as scope expands
• Grow into a CTO-level role over time, taking on broader technical and team leadership as we scale past seed

What We're Looking For

Non-negotiables

• 5–10 years of experience spanning both product management and hands-on technical building — you can write the roadmap and also open the codebase
• Experience in a zero to one capacity. True startup experience.
• Proven ability to ship product in a fast-moving, early-stage environment with limited resources
• Comfortable being the person who diagnoses and resolves issues when systems break, including outside business hours
• High ownership mindset — builder mentality over manager mentality, especially in the first 6–12 months
• Strong technical fluency across modern web stacks (Node.js/NestJS, React/TypeScript, Postgres, AWS) sufficient to work directly in the code when needed
• Based in Raleigh/Durham, NC area, with the expectation of moving to in-office over the next 6–12 months

Strongly preferred

• Fintech, payments, or financial services background — not required, but a major plus given our regulated environment
• Experience with card issuing, payment processing, or Banking-as-a-Service providers
• Prior experience as a Head of Product, VP Product, or founding engineer at a seed/Series A startup
• Higher-ed/Edtech experience or familiarity with university systems (SIS, alumni/advancement CRM, athletics operations)
• Experience using AI tools (Copilot, Cursor, GPT, etc.) to move faster as a builder
• Exposure to event-driven architecture, data pipelines, or real-time analytics

Who you are

• Someone who treats “it's broken” as a call to action, not an escalation to someone else
• Able to translate technical decisions into business outcomes universities and leadership can trust
• A builder first and a strategist second, energized by ambiguity, not paralyzed by it
• Low ego, high accountability, outcomes-first
• In it for the long run — you want to help build the company, not just ship a roadmap and move on

Why This Role

• Founding-team influence with meaningful equity
• A real, signed launch partner and a clear path to scale
• A defined path from Head of Product into CTO as the team and platform grow
• The chance to build the product function, hiring bar, and operating cadence from day one