Head of UAE Product at UMO in Remote

About Us

UMO is a stealth-mode FinTech venture aiming to evolve the way people experience money by building a unified, AI-powered, yet deeply human modern money platform across fiat, crypto, and investments - subject to regulatory approvals. The platform is being designed to break down traditional barriers to money across access, assets, and experience, enabling simpler, more adaptive ways for people to interact with financial services.

We are currently developing our MVP and navigating licensing requirements, with a multidisciplinary team of 100+ people representing 20+ nationalities. With our headquarters in the UAE and offices in Portugal and Ukraine, we are united behind a shared ambition and a relentless focus on serving our customers.

About this role

As a part of our team, you'll help us shape a platform that works for One — a business owner, an artist, a freelancer. In this role, you will hold ultimate product ownership for our United Arab Emirates market, driving our local strategy, commercial partnerships, and infrastructure deployment completely from zero to one. We provide the space for you to operate with deep strategic autonomy, removing the clutter of micromanagement so you can confidently architect a compliant, high-impact regional product footprint end-to-end.

You'll take ownership of:

• Infrastructure Mapping: Chart and navigate the UAE fiat payment landscape end-to-end — vIBAN providers, local payment rails (e.g., UAEFTS, IPP), cross-border corridors, and card issuers and processors — and integrate the right core processing rails seamlessly into our platform.
• Commercial Partnerships: Lead high-stakes, multi-round negotiations with local banks, financial networks, vIBAN and payment-rail providers, issuer-processors, BIN sponsors and card schemes — securing final commercial offers, MOAs and draft contracts covering pricing, SLAs, interchange share, and exclusivity and volume terms.
• Viability & Unit Economics: Validate long-term product viability by building a rigorous unit economics model on actual negotiated pricing — the full fee stack across vIBAN, local and cross-border processing, FX margins, card issuance, interchange, scheme and settlement costs — with conservative/base/optimistic volume scenarios, breakeven thresholds, and stress-tested sensitivity analysis.
• Card Product Architecture: Define and scale the business and operational architecture for our local card products — fiat card money flow (funding, authorization, settlement, and the fee waterfall from customer to scheme to issuer) and crypto card flows (crypto-to-fiat conversion, real-time settlement, custody, and regulatory boundaries) — alongside programmatic payout products.
• Regulatory & Licensing Strategy: Architect the regional regulatory engagement roadmap and drive the licensing pathway in direct alignment with UAE frameworks — CBUAE (e-money / payment service provider / stored-value facility) and VARA for virtual assets — and select the Visa/Mastercard route (BIN sponsorship vs. principal membership) with its certification plan.
• Performance Governance: Establish clear product success criteria, internal controls, and measurable KPI frameworks — time-to-market, cost-per-transaction targets, revenue breakeven timeline, user adoption, and partner SLA compliance — to evaluate regional launch performance.
• Market Entry Roadmaps: Develop and execute a structured, phased market-entry roadmap — Phase 1 (vIBAN + local/cross-border fiat payments), Phase 2 (fiat cards with Visa/Mastercard), Phase 3 (crypto-linked cards) — guiding our platform from MVP through full commercial scaling.

About you:

• Regulated Product Seniority: You have extensive commercial experience in a senior product leadership capacity (at least 5+ years) leading zero-to-one financial launches within highly regulated environments — gained inside banks, licensed fintechs or neobanks, payment institutions, and/or crypto companies.
• Banking & Payments Infrastructure: You have hands-on experience building on core payment and card infrastructure — vIBAN / e-money, local and cross-border payments, card issuing and processing, interchange and scheme economics — from within a bank, PSP, issuer-processor or fintech.
• Crypto & Digital Assets: You bring practical, first-hand exposure to crypto-fiat products at a crypto, exchange or Web3-native company — crypto-to-fiat conversion, multi-currency wallets, crypto card programs, custody, and virtual asset frameworks (e.g., VARA).
• UAE Market Depth: You bring a practical, hands-on understanding of the UAE financial ecosystem — local payment rails, card scheme mechanics, and the CBUAE / VARA regulatory landscape — ideally with existing relationships across local banks, processors and schemes.
• Commercial & Economic Rigor: You are highly data-literate and care deeply about the business context, using strict unit economic models — fee stacks, margins, and sensitivity analysis — to justify product design rather than relying on guesswork.
• Autonomous Problem Execution: You handle delivery expectations and moving deadlines comfortably, maintaining full end-to-end accountability for project outcomes.
• Transparent Leadership: You communicate product context out in the open, spread shared understanding across global engineering squads, and show an absolute zero-tolerance policy for corporate politics or rudeness.
• Linguistic Fluency: You speak and write English at a professional level to confidently coordinate strategy across our global leadership track.

Can get you a few bonus points:

• Existing Partner Network: You already hold working relationships with UAE banks, issuer-processors, BIN sponsors or card schemes that can accelerate negotiations.
• Licensing Track Record: You have personally driven a CBUAE or VARA licensing submission, or a card scheme certification, through to completion.
• Startup Agility: You have previously built or scaled localized products within early-stage fintech ventures or licensed neobanks.
• AI-Augmented Development: You regularly leverage AI productivity workflows or personal organization tools to accelerate your strategic planning, documentation, and roadmap design.

The UMO Standard

• Dynamic Work Environment: Vibrant offices and strong local teams across Lisbon, Dubai, Kyiv, and Lviv — with openness to remote for the right fit.
• Rest & Recovery: 24 days of annual leave, dedicated paid sick leave, and observance of Public Holidays to keep you at your best.
• Recharge Week: After your first year with us, enjoy two consecutive 4-day work weeks annually — a built-in reset to help you sustain peak performance for the long run.
• Full Setup: Top-of-the-line hardware and a home office stipend so you can do your best work anywhere.
• Growth Ecosystem: A dedicated learning budget and a clear, accelerated path toward executive-level leadership within the UMO ecosystem.
• Impact & Ownership: Your work directly shapes the product and company direction — not just executes it.