Senior Product Manager

About Us

We’re a startup with big ambitions: to make estate planning modern, visual, and intelligent. Vanilla is the first AI-powered estate advisory platform, built by advisors, planners, and attorneys to transform how wealth is transferred across generations. Our technology unifies scenario modeling, client visualization, and document creation into one seamless, digital experience.

Our team brings together diverse subject matter expertise across estate planning, wealth management, and scaling SaaS startups. We’re distributed across the U.S., with a mix of fully remote and hybrid roles, and we embrace flexibility while staying closely connected. At Vanilla, you’ll join curious builders and problem-solvers who thrive on speed, autonomy, and impact. Here, you won’t just join a company, you’ll help create it. If you’re excited to tackle hard problems, move quickly, and see your work shape both an industry and a growing startup, we’d love to meet you.

Working Location

This role is a remote position, you must be based out of one of the following states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah or Washington

Job Summary

Integrations are how our product works inside customers' real environments, and where our delivery risk concentrates. We're hiring a senior PM to own that surface end to end: someone who writes specs precise enough to prevent late stage rework, and who has the credibility to sit across from a partner's product and engineering leads and change their approach when it doesn't fit our use case. This is a senior IC role with minimal direction.

What you’ll own

• The integrations roadmap and its sequencing: which systems we connect to, in what order, at what depth, and why.

• The requirements and specification quality for every integration we ship.

• The technical relationship with partner product and engineering teams, jointly with our engineering leads.

• The internal definition of "done" for an integration: not "the connection works," but "the customer's workflow works."

• Reusable integration patterns and platform primitives, so the tenth integration is meaningfully cheaper than the third.

What you’ll do

Get the requirements right the first time

• Translate business context and customer workflows into specifications engineering can build against without needing to guess, covering data models, sync behavior, auth, rate limits, and failure handling.

• Write acceptance criteria tied to the actual use case, not the happy path, defining what success looks like for the end user before a line of code is written.

• Hunt down edge cases early, conflicting writes, permission changes, schema drift, failed syncs, before they surface in build.

• Validate assumptions against real data and real customer environments, through discovery calls and hands on sandbox testing, before committing engineering time.

• Run structured spec review with engineering, and stay engaged through build so ambiguity gets resolved in days, not at demo.

• Own the mid-build change decision, when new information arrives, decide clearly whether to adjust scope, adjust the spec, or hold, and communicate the tradeoff.

Influence partners, not just manage them

• Serve as the product-side counterpart to partner product and engineering teams, scoping joint work and negotiating technical approach when our needs and their constraints don't align.

• Come to partner conversations with a specific, credible alternative, and enough technical detail to explain why the default approach won't hold up.

• Push partners to adapt their approach where the better solution sits on their side, and know when to concede and design around a constraint instead.

• Escalate and negotiate with commercial awareness, understand where we have leverage, where we don't, and what the relationship can absorb.

• Maintain a clear view of each partner's roadmap, deprecation timelines, and reliability posture, and factor it into our own planning.

Operate as a senior PM

• Set direction rather than take it, bring a point of view on where integrations should go and defend it with evidence.

• Prioritize across competing customer, partner, and internal demands and be able to say no with a reason.

• Communicate crisply to executives, engineering, GTM, support, and external partners, adjusting depth to the audience.

• Define the success metrics for integrations, activation, sync reliability, time-to-connect, support load, rework rate, and manage against them.

• Raise the bar on how the wider product team handles requirements and technical discovery.

What we’re looking for

Required

• 6+ years in product management, with at least 3 years owning integrations, APIs, platform, or partner-facing products.

• A demonstrable track record of shipping non-trivial third-party integrations — ideally several — where you personally owned the requirements.

• Real technical depth: you read API documentation for enjoyment, can test endpoints yourself, reason about data models and sync architecture, and hold your own in an engineering design discussion without being the engineer.

• Written specification skills strong enough that engineers reference your docs rather than re-interview you. We will ask to see a redacted example.

• Direct experience negotiating technical approach with external partners or vendors, including at least one case where you changed their plan.

• Comfort with ambiguity in the discovery phase and rigor in the commit phase — able to tell those two modes apart and behave differently in each.

• Strong customer-workflow instinct: you frame integration work in terms of the job the user is trying to complete, not the systems being connected.

Preferred

• Experience integrating with portfolio management or financial planning platforms (e.g., Addepar, eMoney), CRM systems used by advisors, or AI meeting/notetaking tools.

• Background in wealth management or fintech, or prior work in a domain with comparable data sensitivity and compliance constraints.

• Experience building an integration platform or framework, not only point-to-point connections.

• Prior exposure to partner enablement: SDKs, sandbox environments, certification programs, or public API documentation.

The salary range for this role is $170,000 to $180,000. Our compensation packages also include a performance based bonus and equity. Compensation is based on a number of factors and may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.

Benefits:

• Flexible paid time off policy and 10 company-wide paid holidays 

• Parental leave, 6 weeks for all full-time employees and up to 14 weeks for birthing parents

• Medical, dental, and vision benefits coverage for employees and their families 

• 401K eligibility after one month of employment

• Free estate planning documents

• Budget for learning & development and home office setup 

• Paid parking or transit for hybrid and in office employees 

Vanilla Technologies Inc. (dba "Vanilla") provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training.

Vanilla participates in E-Verify and will provide the federal government with your Form I-9 information to confirm that you are authorized to work in the U.S.