Senior Product Manager - Payments

About the role

We're looking for an experienced Senior Product Manager to own and drive the strategy, roadmap, and delivery of PawaPay's core payment products. Reporting to the Head of Product, you'll work at the intersection of Engineering, Operations, Commercial, and our network of external payment providers - with a clear mandate to make money move better across Africa. This is a senior, high-ownership role for someone who thrives in a fast-paced fintech environment and brings deep domain expertise in payments and the African financial services landscape. You'll own a critical problem space end-to-end, driving measurable improvements for us to be able to service the needs of merchants and give them access to all the payment methods they need.

Responsibilities

• Product Strategy & Roadmap
• Own the end-to-end product lifecycle for PawaPay's mobile money and bank payment products - from discovery through delivery, measurement, and iteration.
• Define and maintain the product roadmap in alignment with company strategy, customer needs, operational priorities, and market opportunities.
• Conduct market research and competitive analysis across African payments markets to identify trends, opportunities, and emerging risks.
• Payments
• Develop a deep understanding of payment flows across our network and identify opportunities to enable more business models and expand the reach to customers in Africa.
• Work closely with Engineering to prioritise the backlog, define requirements, and deliver high-quality solutions that improve payment performance and operational efficiency.
• Define and track key product and operational metrics, using data to inform prioritisation and measure impact.
• Operations & Partners
• Partner with our Country teams to develop and optimise the payment products and optimise their performance.
• Work directly with mobile money operators, banks, and other payment partners to understand market-specific challenges, platform capabilities, and integration opportunities.
• Commercial & Customer
• Collaborate with Commercial, Customer Success, and Account Management to understand merchant needs and translate feedback into product improvements.
• Engage directly with customers and partners to validate product direction and build strong feedback loops.
• Champion a customer-centric and evidence-driven approach to product development across the organisation.

Requirements

• Essential
• 5-10 years of product management experience, with a strong track record of owning and delivering payments, fintech, or financial infrastructure products.
• Deep understanding of payment systems end-to-end: transaction processing, provider integrations, routing, settlement, reconciliation, and failure management.
• Experience working closely with Engineering to deliver technically complex products and platform improvements.
• Strong commercial awareness - able to balance customer needs, operational realities, technical constraints, and business objectives.
• Demonstrated experience using data to identify problems, prioritise opportunities, and measure product outcomes.
• Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills, with the ability to influence across technical and non-technical teams.
• Experience working in agile product environments, owning products from discovery through delivery.
• Highly Desirable
• Direct experience in African payments markets and a strong understanding of the payment ecosystem.
• Knowledge of regulatory and compliance requirements across African payments markets.
• Experience in a high-growth startup or scale-up environment.
• Strong technical fluency - comfortable discussing APIs, integrations, distributed systems, and payment architecture.

Benefits

Additional Information

Who is PawaPay PawaPay is a pan-African fintech enabling local payment channels used by the mass market to both local and international merchants. We operate in a highly regulated, partner-driven environment and are in scale-up mode, with ambitious growth plans across multiple African markets. Our vision is to simplify business for companies and consumers in Africa and we do that by ensuring that payments simply work, at scale, despite fragmentation and complexity that exists on the Continent. Through our payments API we already facilitate over 4 million transactions a day across 20 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. We are the largest PSP on the Continent for the processing of mobile money payments, and have positioned ourselves well to lead the payment space as it grows over the next decade. At PawaPay, there is an entrepreneurial spirit coupled with a modern and professional working culture. The fast-paced, ever-changing environment will suit someone who can adapt and think on their feet. In return, you will have the opportunity to work alongside a group of dedicated and smart individuals working towards the same mission. We work as a remote team and have team members in Europe, Africa and Asia.

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