Product Manager - Core Banking Platform

Real Estate is the proving ground for our Core Banking Platform. Over 80% of originations already run on Thought Machine Vault Core, and the platform is now where our Real Estate proposition will grow. This role owns the Real Estate product agenda on that platform. You will define the initiatives that make up the Real Estate roadmap for the Vault Squad and define how our Real Estate products behave on Vault Core to the level of precision an engineer can build from: how interest accrues, how fees are charged, how payments are allocated, how drawdowns work, and what happens at every boundary and edge case in between. It is a deliberately deep, hands-on product role for someone who is energised rather than daunted by day-count conventions, rounding rules and payment waterfalls. Roadmap & Initiative Definition - Define and shape the Real Estate initiatives on the Core Banking Platform roadmap, sequenced against Real Estate’s commercial priorities and the platform’s delivery capacity. - Run discovery on new Real Estate propositions such as bridging drawdowns and development finance, establishing the underlying customer and business need, the product mechanics it implies, and whether the platform can support it. - Convert business intent into well-formed initiatives with a clear problem statement, scope, dependencies and definition of success, so the Vault Squad has a credible, prioritised pipeline of work. - Bring a point of view. Where a business request is poorly formed, unaffordable or better solved elsewhere in the estate, say so early and propose the alternative. Product Definition on Vault Core - Own how the Real Estate lending range behaves on Vault Core — interest accrual and capitalisation, interest payment dates and rate-change mechanics, fees, payment allocation and waterfall order, drawdown and repayment behaviour, arrears and forbearance treatment — including product configuration and the rationale behind every parameter choice. - Translate propositions, facility terms and legal documentation into unambiguous smart contract requirements, with user stories and Gherkin acceptance criteria covering happy path, unhappy path, boundary and invalid-input cases. - Build worked calculation models that supply the expected numbers behind acceptance criteria, so correctness is demonstrable rather than asserted. - Decide whether a need is met by configuration, new platform capability, or an operational workaround, 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 of customer-facing interest, fee and balance calculations, auditable posting behaviour and correct GL treatment. - 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 Vault 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 Real Estate business and Operations to understand how products are actually sold and serviced, and bring that reality into product decisions. - Work with the origination, servicing and payments teams so that product behaviour and the operational capability around it land together rather than separately. - Engage Finance, Data, and Risk & Compliance early, so accounting treatment, reporting needs and control expectations shape requirements rather than arriving as late constraints. - Communicate calculation and behaviour decisions in plain language to non-technical stakeholders, and in exacting detail to engineers. Both audiences should recognise the same decision. - Bring Real Estate’s needs into cross-book design conversations, and flag early where a Real Estate requirement is really a shared platform capability. Interfaces & Boundaries - The Vault Platform Product Manager owns the Vault implementation across the Bank and all product lines on it. This role owns Real Estate’s product definition and roadmap within that, and escalates cross-product-line trade-offs rather than resolving them locally. - The Product Lead, Core Banking Platform owns cross-book demand consolidation, investment business cases and prioritisation. This role supplies the product substance those business cases rest on. - 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. Value This Role Will Add - Gives Real Estate a single accountable owner of product definition on Vault Core, so the squad builds to defined intent rather than reverse-engineering it. - Turns business ambition into a credible, prioritised Real Estate pipeline, rather than a queue of loosely defined requests. - Reduces rework and post-release defects by resolving calculation and edge-case ambiguity before build rather than during test. - Brings new Real Estate propositions such as bridging drawdowns and development finance to market faster through proper discovery and precise definition up front. - Builds the connective tissue between the Real Estate business, the Vault Squad engineers, and the Finance, Data and Risk functions that depend on how these products behave. - Creates capacity in the Vault Platform Product Manager role to focus on the platform across all product lines. Essential - Product management experience with lending products and their mechanics — interest accrual, day-count conventions, fees, payment allocation and waterfalls — with genuine ownership of how products behave rather than surface-level feature definition, and the confidence to reason about edge cases unprompted. - 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. - Experience with a modern configurable core banking platform, and the ability to interpret how a product is configured well enough to challenge whether it matches intent. - Comfortable working with API-based, event-driven systems, and able to reason about how components integrate and where data flows between them. - Uses data to drive decisions, able to model expected outcomes, interrogate system output directly, 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. - 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 smart contract behaviour and posting mechanics. - Experience of Buy-to-Let, bridging or development finance products, particularly multi-tranche or drawdown-based facilities. - Understanding of the full servicing lifecycle and the system landscape around it: origination, servicing, payments, collections and data. - Understanding of accounting principles and general ledger reporting, and how lending product design affects both. - Python literacy sufficient to read smart contract code. Writing it is not required.