Senior Product Manager

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.

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, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah or Washington

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.

• 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.

Get the requirements right the first time

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

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  Define the best-in-class user experience making the ease of importing data into Vanilla systems incredibly intuitive.

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  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.

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

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

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  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.

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  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

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  Have an AI mindset where user effort is replaced by agentic workflows.

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  Influence the direction of the roadmap instead of being an order taker bringing a point of view on where integrations should go and defend it with evidence.

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

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

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

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

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 effortlessly, 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.

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

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

Nice to Have

• 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.

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.