Moorepay is a trusted leader in UK payroll and HR, serving thousands of employers — and we're now in the middle of the most significant transformation in our history. We're rebuilding our HCM solution from the ground up: bringing payroll, HR and workforce management together on a single, modern, AI-native platform, and rebuilding our product and engineering model around it — AI-first, fast, and unlike anything the business has done before.
This is a genuine inflection point. The foundations are being laid right now, and you'd be joining while there's still real shape to give — new architecture, new ways of working, and a product team rethinking every assumption about how software gets built. This is the kind of product work most people only get to read about.
We're building our product organisation around an AI Pod model — small, autonomous, cross-functional delivery units bringing Engineering, QA, UX and Product together, each accountable for measurable outcomes rather than feature output. As a Product Owner, you'll sit inside one of those Pods as a full delivery member, not as a liaison between the business and engineering.
Your Product Manager sets the strategy, the commercial case and the roadmap; you turn that into a clear, sequenced backlog of precise, buildable specifications, make the day-to-day trade-off calls that keep the Pod moving, and accept the work as it's delivered. You are the difference between a good brief and a good product.
Your customers extend beyond end users, too. Other product teams depend on what you and your Pod deliver to build their own work on top of, and serving them all cleanly — not just the loudest — is part of what makes this job hard and rewarding.
You'll work within an AI-first software development lifecycle — engineers generating code from structured specifications you help create, AI tools accelerating build cycles that would previously have taken months, and a delivery cadence that demands clarity, precision and genuine product thinking, not process management.
You will be based in our Manchester office, working alongside a talented and growing product and engineering team, on a hybrid basis — 3 days per week in Manchester.
Most product roles ask you to manage a backlog inside a product that already exists. This one asks you to help build something that doesn't exist yet — a unified, AI-native HCM platform that will change how UK employers manage their people, and the platform foundation underneath it.
You won't be inheriting someone else's decisions. You'll be making them. The context you contribute to will outlast your first workstream and inform every Pod that works in your domain after you. The outcomes you deliver will be measurable. The product you help build will be genuinely new.
If you want to work on a product that matters, in a team serious about building it well, at a moment when the opportunity is still wide open — this is the role.
Key Responsibilities
- Own outcomes, not stories — you're accountable for a measurable change in the product, not a list of completed tickets. Define the outcome your Pod is delivering, set the success signals, and validate that the change is real — in production, with real users.
- Own your Pod's backlog — turn your Product Manager's strategy and roadmap into a clear, sequenced backlog of precise, buildable specifications.
- Define design intent with your UX Designer — before any specification is written, work with your Pod's embedded UX Designer to define the user journeys, interaction principles and edge cases that govern the feature. Design intent is a hard constraint on the build, not a late-stage review.
- Write specifications with precision — author specs and acceptance criteria that are structured and unambiguous enough for engineers — and the AI tools they use — to build from directly, with nothing left to guess.
- Serve other teams as customers — your work has customers beyond end users — other Pods and product teams depend on what you deliver, and serving them all cleanly, not just the loudest, is core to the role. These dependencies run in both directions across the teams you work with.
- Make the day-to-day calls — own in-Pod prioritisation and trade-offs, so Engineering, QA and UX always know what matters most right now.
- Be the quality gate — review delivered work against your acceptance criteria, validate it behaves as intended — not just that it passed automated tests — and sign it off before it ships.
- Run the Pod's rhythm — drive Pod ceremonies — planning, stand-ups, retros — keeping the team focused on outcomes, not just output.
- Maintain context and domain knowledge — contribute to and maintain the context documentation for your Pod's area — Platform, Domain and Workstream context — so engineering has the accumulated knowledge of the product before a line of code is generated.
- Close the learning loop — after every release, measure whether the outcome was achieved. Feed findings back into context documents, the backlog and the next cycle.
- A good level of experience as a Product Owner, Product Manager or Business Analyst role in a software product organisation (SaaS experience ideal)
- Exceptional written precision — you can write specifications and acceptance criteria that leave no room for ambiguity
- Genuine curiosity about AI-assisted development, and a willingness to work at the frontier of how software gets built
- Strong collaborative instincts — you'll work daily with engineers, QA and design, and the quality of those relationships directly determines the quality of what gets built
- Strong stakeholder skills — able to serve multiple internal teams whose own work depends on yours
- Adaptable and comfortable working in a fast-moving environment where the right answer isn't always obvious and the process is still being refined
- Experience writing formal acceptance criteria in BDD (Given/When/Then) format, or a strong willingness to develop this quickly
- Familiarity with AI-assisted development & research/task tools — Cursor, Claude, Copilot or equivalent — or demonstrable interest in how they work
- Experience with structured product specification approaches beyond traditional user stories
- Knowledge of payroll, HR or wider HCM software, either as a product practitioner or someone who's worked closely with these domains
- Experience with workforce management, time and attendance, or employment compliance in a UK or EU context
- Experience with platform or shared-services product areas — identity, integration, shared data, workflow — rather than standalone feature products
- Familiarity with OKR-based planning and outcome-driven roadmaps
- Exposure to event-driven architectures or platform product thinking
- Experience with Azure DevOps or equivalent delivery tooling
Part of the Zellis Group, Moorepay is a team of over 500 friendly professionals across four offices in Swinton (Manchester), Sheffield, Birmingham and Kochi (India). We’re passionate about making Moorepay a fantastic place to work for every single one of our colleagues. The average length of service at Moorepay is 12 years, which speaks for itself!
To help make Moorepay such a great place to work, we focus on three things in our company culture: mental health support, maintaining a healthy work/life balance, and equal opportunities and inclusion for all.
Here’s what you’ll gain if you join our team:
- A career packed with opportunity, in a stable and growing company.
- A comprehensive programme of learning and development.
- Competitive base salary.
- 25 days annual leave, with the opportunity to buy more. You’ll even get your birthday off as well!
- Private medical insurance.
- Life assurance 4x salary.
- Enhanced pension with up to 8.5% employer contributions.
- A huge range of additional flexible benefits across financial & personal wellbeing, lifestyle & leisure.
