Senior Product Manager - Direct Investing

About the role

As Senior Product Manager – Direct Investing, you'll own the strategy, roadmap and customer outcomes for Kernel's Direct investing proposition.

Your immediate focus will be expanding our US Shares & ETFs product and building a deeper, more compelling experience for customers. From there, you'll explore opportunities to expand into local markets and identify where direct ownership of securities can enable new investment experiences.

You'll work at the intersection of customer experience, investing, technology and financial infrastructure. That means understanding what customers need, but also getting into the detail of how brokerage, custody, FX, money movement, market data and regulation come together to make a great investing possible.

You'll work closely with Engineering and Design, as well as our Investments, Operations, Compliance and GTM market teams and external partners. You'll be expected to bring structure to ambiguous opportunities, make pragmatic trade-offs and take ideas from early exploration through to products in customers' hands.

About Kernel

Kernel is one of New Zealand's fastest growing fintechs, helping Kiwis build long-term wealth through KiwiSaver, managed funds, savings products and investing. Our team combines deep financial services expertise with modern technology to build products that genuinely improve people's financial wellbeing.

We value ownership, pragmatism, collaboration and high standards, and we're investing in both our platform and our people as we continue to grow.

As part of that growth, we're looking for a Senior Product Manager to lead the next phase of Kernel's Direct investing proposition. You'll take ownership of our US Shares & ETFs product, expand its capabilities and explore how direct investing can open up new products and markets for Kernel and our customers.

This is an opportunity to shape an important part of Kernel's future: making direct investing more accessible and useful, while staying true to our focus on helping people build long-term wealth.

What you’ll do

• Own the product strategy and multi-quarter roadmap for Kernel's Direct investing proposition.

• Lead the continued evolution of our Shares & ETFs product, identifying opportunities to improve the experience, proposition and customer value.

• Explore Kernel's expansion into local markets and determine where direct investing can unlock new opportunities.

• Develop a deep understanding of our customers, the investing landscape and emerging market opportunities, translating these into clear product priorities.

• Work across brokerage, custody, FX, payments and money movement to create simple customer experiences from complex financial infrastructure.

• Lead product discovery, testing customer problems, commercial assumptions and potential solutions before committing significant investment.

• Build strong business cases for new opportunities, considering customer value, commercial potential, operational complexity, regulatory requirements and strategic fit.

• Define clear measures of success and use customer behaviour, data and market insight to continuously improve the product.

• Turn strategy into clear product briefs and requirements that align Design, Engineering and stakeholders around the problem we're solving and why.

• Partner closely with Investments, Operations, Compliance, Marketing and Customer teams to bring new investment products and capabilities to market.

• Build strong relationships with external technology and financial partners, helping shape solutions that deliver the best outcomes for Kernel and our customers.

• Make thoughtful trade-offs between speed, customer experience, commercial outcomes, risk and scalability in a regulated environment.

• Contribute to Kernel's broader product strategy and help raise the standard of product thinking across the organisation.

You'll be great if you bring

• Strong product management experience delivering customer-facing digital products, ideally within fintech, investing, wealth, brokerage, payments or another regulated environment.

• A track record of owning a meaningful product area and taking it from strategy and discovery through to delivery and continuous improvement.

• Strong commercial judgement and the ability to assess opportunities across customer value, economics, complexity and strategic fit.

• Excellent discovery skills and the ability to turn ambiguous opportunities into well-defined problems, hypotheses and decisions.

• Confidence working with data and defining the metrics that tell you whether a product is actually succeeding.

• The ability to understand complex systems and infrastructure while keeping the customer experience simple.

• Strong stakeholder leadership and the ability to align Engineering, Design, Operations, Compliance and commercial teams around a clear direction.

• Comfort working with external partners and navigating technical, operational and commercial dependencies.

• Sound judgement, high ownership and the ability to move quickly without losing sight of risk or quality.

• A genuine interest in investing and helping customers build long-term wealth.

Bonus things you could bring along to the role

• Experience building brokerage, investing or trading products.

• Knowledge of US, New Zealand or Australian securities markets.

• Experience with brokerage, custody, settlement, FX, market data or investment operations.

• Experience launching financial products into new markets or jurisdictions.

• Understanding of the New Zealand wealth management and regulatory environment.

• Experience working with APIs and external financial infrastructure providers.

• Experience developing new propositions from early commercial exploration through to launch and scale.

• Knowledge of emerging financial technologies and market infrastructure, including tokenisation, stablecoins and digital assets, and an understanding of how these could evolve investing, ownership and money movement over time.

Why You’ll Love it at Kernel

• Take ownership of one of Kernel's most exciting areas of growth and help define what Direct investing becomes for our customers.

• Shape investment products in a way few New Zealand fintechs have the opportunity to do, combining modern technology with deep investment capability.

• Explore new markets and products while helping determine where Kernel goes next.

• Work on products you can be a direct customer of, building technology that helps Kiwis, like you, grow their wealth.

• Solve genuinely interesting product problems spanning customer experience, investing, brokerage, FX, payments and financial infrastructure.

• Join a high-performing team that values ownership, trust, collaboration and continuous improvement.

• Enjoy the best of both worlds with a flexible hybrid setup, connecting in person while keeping the freedom to work from home a couple of days each week (minimum 3 days/week in the office).

• Health insurance, parental leave top-up, and professional development support.

• Extra staff holidays, office snacks, coffee, and a dog-friendly environment.

Join our team

We're looking for someone who gets excited about the future of investing and wants the ownership to help build it.

You don't need to arrive knowing every detail of securities markets or financial infrastructure. What matters is that you're a strong product thinker, comfortable getting into complex problems, commercially minded, and motivated by building products that create genuine long-term value for customers.

If that sounds like you, we'd love to hear from you.

To be considered, please submit both your CV and a cover letter outlining your interest in Kernel, your relevant experience, and what excites you about the opportunity to shape the future of Direct investing.

Visit our careers page for more on working at Kernel and follow us on LinkedIn & Instagram. to stay connected.