---
title: 'Product Manager - Payments at Substack'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/product-manager-payments-substack-san-francisco-wcvj0nvd9ba6'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-25'
---

# Product Manager - Payments at Substack

- **Company:** Substack
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-10-22
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-25
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/substack/32cbda9c-7783-45d1-83b9-73274f2311ba

## Job description

## About Substack

Substack helps independent writers, artists, podcasters, videographers and other creators build sustainable businesses through direct relationships with their audiences. We are building products that give creators more freedom, ownership and ways to earn from their work.

## The Role

We're looking for a Product Manager to help expand monetization on Substack. You'll build better ways for readers to support creators and make the experience of paying for great work simpler and more rewarding. Your scope will include gifting, retention offers and improvements to the payment and subscription experience, with opportunities to explore commerce and, over time, advertising-related monetization. You'll work closely with Payments Engineering, Design, Data, Growth and Creator Product, as well as Chris Chen and the C-level leadership team. You'll develop a clear, data-informed point of view on what to build and advocate for it with conviction, while staying open to evidence and feedback. You'll get close to creators and readers and move comfortably between product strategy and the details of a checkout flow, an offer, an AI-built prototype or an experiment readout. This is an individual contributor role. We are considering candidates who can independently lead a focused feature area as well as those ready to own a broader product area end to end, with scope calibrated to demonstrated experience and impact.

## What you'll do

- Identify the most valuable opportunities to improve creator earnings and build a focused roadmap with clear goals and trade-offs.
- Develop gifting experiences that help readers support creators, share value with others and strengthen paid communities.
- Improve retention, renewal and win-back experiences, partnering with Growth on offers and subscription lifecycle improvements.
- Make payment journeys clearer and more effective across web and mobile, from plan selection and checkout through successful payment and renewal.
- Explore new monetization pathways, including commerce, and help shape future opportunities in ads as the business evolves.
- Use customer research, direct data analysis and rapid AI-powered prototyping to explore solutions and validate ideas before committing engineering time.
- Partner with engineering and design to make timely decisions, cut scope to learn sooner and maintain a high bar for product quality.
- Define success metrics, run experiments, read results honestly and follow through after launch.
- Translate recurring creator needs and support issues into reusable product capabilities; communicate launches clearly with cross-functional partners.

## What we're looking for

- A record of shipping products that improve meaningful customer or business outcomes, with a clear account of your contribution.
- Strategic thinking and strong product judgment: you can use data and customer insight to form an independent point of view, make clear trade-offs and advocate strongly for your recommendations, including with senior leaders, while changing course when evidence calls for it.
- Deep curiosity about how creators earn a living and how readers decide what to pay for.
- Analytical strength, including funnel and cohort analysis, experimentation and the ability to investigate questions directly.
- An AI-native approach to product development: you use AI tools and agents as part of your everyday workflow and can rapidly build working prototypes to test ideas and answer questions yourself.
- Strong design taste and product craft: you can recognize and help shape intuitive, polished experiences, with attention to the details that make financial products understandable and trustworthy. You may have developed this judgment at a company known for excellent design or demonstrated it through products you've built.
- Clear writing and the ability to align engineering, design, data and business partners around decisions.
- Comfort with ambiguity and limited resources, and a willingness to do the detailed work needed to ship and learn.
- Experience in payments, subscriptions, growth, commerce, marketplaces or creator products would be especially useful. Familiarity with payment providers and mobile purchase ecosystems is a plus.

## Why this role

The ways people support creators are still evolving. This role offers the chance to improve a core economic relationship on Substack while developing new ways for creators to build durable businesses.

Substack's compensation package includes a market-competitive salary, equity for all full-time roles, and exceptional benefits. Our cash compensation range for this role is $210,000–$230,000. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate experience and expertise. Substack is an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity or transgender status), age, national origin, veteran or disability status. We’re seeking people passionate about enabling independent expression and building a better business model for creators. If you want to see what media, communities, and content can become when unmoored from advertising models, and you have the skills and experience to contribute, we’d love to meet you. Please see our Privacy Notice for details regarding Substack's collection and use of personal information relating to the application and recruitment process by clicking [here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UjmY1acxnd27iIde83PxR7XdecR29aIyfkkmEOwAMGY/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.a0wuzmt3mjmm).

## About Substack

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Substack provides a platform for independent writers, podcasters, and creators to publish, build audiences, and earn revenue directly through paid subscriptions.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series C)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA (with a new office in New York City)
- **Founded**: 2017
- **Founders**: Chris Best (CEO), Jairaj Sethi (CTO), Hamish McKenzie (CWO)

## Core Business
- Primary industry/industries: Media, Publishing, Creator Economy, SaaS
- Target customers: Individual writers, podcasters, video creators, independent publishers, media companies, experts, and educators (B2C and B2B)
- Mission or purpose statement: "To build a new economic engine for culture — empowering writers, creators, and publishers to own their work, own their audience, and earn directly from their ideas."

## Products & Services
- **Publishing Platform**: A full-featured CMS and writing tool designed for longform content, with support for posts, newsletters, scheduling, and media embedding.
- **Substack App**: A mobile and web app that connects readers with creators, featuring discovery tools like recommendations, Notes, trending topics, and leaderboards.
- **Native Podcasting**: Built-in recording studio and live video capabilities, with automatic distribution to Substack, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube, including premium episode options.
- **Payments & Subscription Management**: Handles all billing, subscriber management, and revenue tools (welcome sequences, win-back campaigns, analytics). Creators keep 90% of revenue minus credit card fees.
- **Community Tools**: Subscriber chats, comment threads, and moderation features to turn publications into communities.
- **Substack Defender**: Legal support program providing publishers access to legal fees, advice, and pre-publication review for defamation, trademark, and copyright issues.
- **Network Discovery**: Built-in growth engine where more than half of new subscribers come from within Substack’s network, including recommendations and collaborations.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed (last raised $100M in Series C in July 2025)
- **Key Metric**: Over 5 million paid subscriptions across the network; more than 30% of paid subscriptions come from within Substack’s network; tens of millions of posts discovered daily in the app.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Andreessen Horowitz, BOND, The Chernin Group (TCG); part of Y Combinator’s winter 2018 batch.
- **Growth Signals**: Raised $100M Series C in July 2025; team has grown to over 100 people across the US, Canada, and UK; opened a new New York City office; top writers earn millions annually.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Creator-first economic model**: Writers keep 90% of revenue, own their audience and content, and can leave anytime with no platform fees or contracts.
- **Built-in network effects**: More than half of new subscribers come from within the platform’s discovery tools, reducing the need for creators to build audiences from scratch.
- **All-in-one platform**: Combines publishing, payments, growth tools, analytics, podcasting, video, and community management — no technical expertise required.
- **Legal support**: Substack Defender provides unique legal protection that reduces risk for independent publishers.
- **Brand trust and ecosystem**: A recognized leader in the creator economy with a strong network of high-profile writers and millions of paying subscribers.

## Strategic Focus
- Expanding the platform beyond newsletters into a full "media app" for all creator formats (writing, podcasting, video, live content).
- Growing the network effect through recommendations, Notes, and app-driven discovery to reduce customer acquisition costs for creators.
- Scaling the enterprise offering for media companies and full newsrooms.
- Deepening community features to increase subscriber engagement and retention.
- Building out the New York City office to expand talent and presence on the East Coast.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Small but growing team (100+ people) with a strong mission-driven focus on empowering creators and independent culture. Every employee participates in customer support to build empathy with users.
- **Remote/Hybrid Policy**: Hybrid model; employees can work from San Francisco HQ, the new New York office, or remotely across the US, Canada, and UK.
- **Benefits**: 100% premium coverage for employees and dependents (health care), fully funded HRA plans, generous parental leave, monthly internet/phone stipend, flexible vacation, 12 paid holidays, and a winter office shutdown between Christmas Eve and New Year’s.
- **Engineering Culture**: Pragmatic approach to problem-solving, shipping high-quality products; team works on a platform that directly impacts millions of creators and subscribers.
- **Perks**: Home office customization allowance, internet stipends, and a strong emphasis on work-life balance with flexible time off.

## Sources
1. [substack.com/about](https://substack.com/about)
2. [substack.com/jobs](https://substack.com/jobs)
3. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/substack](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/substack)
4. [builtin.com/company/substack](https://builtin.com/company/substack)
5. [linkedin.com/company/substack](https://www.linkedin.com/company/substack)

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