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role
adyen / Senior Product Manager - Integration Testing & Enablement
model
anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.6
created
2026-07-20T18:11

Interviewer

Eric Tomko is a Senior Technical Recruiter at Adyen, having joined in June 2026 — making him very new to the company (about 2 months in). Before Adyen, he spent 5 years at PayPal, most recently recruiting for AI, Machine Learning, and Data Science teams, which gives him relevant fintech and AI hiring context. His background spans talent acquisition across tech (PayPal), retail (Crate and Barrel), market research (Kantar), and a prior career as a Chemical/Nuclear Technician in the US Army. As the recruiter screen, Eric's focus will be on culture fit, compensation alignment, logistics, and whether the candidate clears baseline requirements — not deep technical evaluation. Shared context exists through PayPal (fintech/payments adjacent) and AI/ML recruiting, which overlaps with Felix's AI platform work.

Questions to ask them (20)

categoryquestionwhy
interviewer_experience You just joined Adyen about two months ago after five years at PayPal — that's a meaningful move between two major payments players. What drew you to Adyen specifically, and what's surprised you most about the culture since you've been here? Builds genuine rapport, surfaces early impressions of Adyen's culture from a fresh insider perspective, and signals that you've done your homework on his background.
interviewer_experience At PayPal you were deeply embedded in recruiting for AI and ML teams — that's a pretty specialized domain. How has recruiting for Adyen's product and platform roles compared so far in terms of what the hiring teams are looking for? Leverages his AI recruiting background to understand what Adyen's hiring bar looks like for technical product roles, and positions Felix's AI work as directly relevant.
interviewer_experience Coming from the Army before moving into talent acquisition — that's a non-traditional path into recruiting. Do you find that background shapes how you evaluate candidates or how you think about team fit? Shows genuine curiosity about his journey, builds personal rapport, and may reveal values Adyen prizes in candidates that aren't explicit in the job description.
role_team_dynamics The JD describes this role as starting focused on payments simulation but rapidly expanding to a holistic testing suite across financial products, Uplift, Loyalty, and Giving. From what you've seen in the hiring process so far, is that expansion already scoped out, or is the person coming in expected to define what that looks like? Clarifies whether this is a defined roadmap execution role or a true 0-to-1 strategy role — critical for evaluating scope and autonomy.
role_team_dynamics How long has this specific role been open, and is this a backfill or a net-new headcount? Signals whether there's urgency, whether a predecessor left a gap to fill, or whether this is greenfield — all of which affect onboarding and expectations.
role_team_dynamics The role requires driving adoption across multiple product teams without direct authority — that's a significant stakeholder management challenge. Can you share anything about the team structure this PM would be working within, and roughly how many product teams they'd need to align? Surfaces organizational complexity and whether the role has the structural support needed to succeed at cross-team influence.
role_team_dynamics What does success look like in the first 90 days for this role, from Adyen's perspective? Standard but essential — understanding early expectations helps Felix calibrate his pitch and assess whether the ramp is realistic.
technical_environment The JD mentions pioneering AI-native testing and making the platform machine-readable for AI coding agents. Is there already a technical vision or prototype for this, or is the PM expected to define what 'AI-native' means for Adyen's testing infrastructure? Distinguishes between executing on an existing AI strategy versus defining it — directly relevant to Felix's AI platform and agentic AI experience.
technical_environment The role mentions consolidating a fragmented landscape of legacy testing tools. Do you know if the engineering team supporting this PM is already identified, or is team-building part of the mandate? Clarifies whether Felix walks into an established team or needs to help build it — a major factor in evaluating the role's complexity and timeline.
technical_environment Is the payments simulation platform primarily an internal tool used by Adyen's own teams, an external self-service tool for merchants, or both — and does that dual audience affect how the team is structured? Helps Felix understand the developer experience surface area and whether his DevPortal/SDK experience at Intuit maps directly to this context.
culture_working_style Adyen talks a lot about the 'Adyen Formula' — valuing team success over individual ego and enabling others even when your contribution is invisible. From your two months here and your recruiting conversations, how does that actually show up day-to-day versus being aspirational language in a job description? Probes cultural authenticity from someone with a fresh, unfiltered perspective — Eric is new enough to give an honest read rather than a rehearsed answer.
culture_working_style The role is described as office-first in San Francisco. Can you give me a sense of what the typical week looks like — are teams fully in five days, or is there a hybrid rhythm in practice? Practical logistics question that signals respect for the in-person requirement while clarifying what it actually means day-to-day.
culture_working_style How does Adyen typically handle disagreement between a PM and engineering or regional product teams — especially in a role like this where the PM needs to deprecate legacy tools that other teams depend on? Surfaces how conflict and authority work in practice, which is critical for a role explicitly requiring influence without direct authority.
growth_development The scope of this role is described as rapidly expanding beyond payments simulation to the full Adyen platform. For PMs who've been in similar platform roles at Adyen, what does the career trajectory typically look like — does expanded scope translate into formal growth, or is it more about deepening impact in place? Assesses whether Adyen's growth culture matches Felix's seniority and ambition, without implying he's already looking beyond the role.
growth_development You recruited heavily for AI and ML roles at PayPal — do you see Adyen investing in similar AI-focused product and engineering growth paths, or is AI more of a feature lens applied to existing roles here? Leverages Eric's AI recruiting background to understand whether Adyen is building a genuine AI product organization or treating AI as an add-on — relevant to Felix's AI-native background.
strategy_vision The JD frames this role as transforming a fragmented testing environment into a unified platform. Is that consolidation work already resourced and prioritized at the leadership level, or is part of the PM's job to build the business case for that investment? Determines whether Felix would be executing on a funded mandate or still selling the vision internally — a major difference in role complexity.
strategy_vision Adyen serves merchants like Meta, Uber, and Microsoft — enterprises with sophisticated engineering teams. How does the testing platform strategy balance the needs of those large, technically mature merchants versus smaller merchants who may need more prescriptive guidance? Shows strategic depth and surfaces whether Adyen has a clear segmentation strategy or whether that's part of what the PM needs to define.
strategy_vision The role mentions 'automated go-live validation' as part of the full testing journey. Is that capability something Adyen is building from scratch, or is there an existing foundation the PM would be extending? Clarifies the build-vs-extend balance and helps Felix assess how much of his 0-to-1 platform experience is directly applicable.
shared_context You spent five years recruiting for PayPal's AI and data science teams — Adyen and PayPal obviously compete in the payments space but have pretty different technical cultures. From a talent perspective, what kinds of backgrounds tend to thrive at Adyen that might not have been the profile PayPal was optimizing for? Builds rapport through shared fintech context, and surfaces genuine differentiation in what Adyen values — directly useful for Felix to calibrate his pitch.
shared_context At PayPal you were recruiting for AI and ML — I've been building AI evaluation platforms and agentic frameworks on the product and engineering side. Did you find that the most successful AI product hires at PayPal came from pure PM backgrounds, or did engineering and research backgrounds translate well into those roles? Leverages direct shared domain (AI product/recruiting) to build peer-level rapport and subtly surfaces Felix's technical depth as a differentiator.

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