Senior Technical Program Manager – LATAM and South Africa

PayJoy is expanding access to smartphone financing and digital credit globally. We're looking for a Technical Program Manager to help launch and scale our financial products—including phone finance, credit line, card, and new initiatives like Super Pacman and Super Monarch—across existing and new markets in LATAM and South Africa.

This role sits at the intersection of Product, Engineering, Legal, Risk, Design, and GTM/country teams. You will own delivery governance for product launches across your markets: roadmap, dependencies, execution cadence, launch readiness, and post-launch iteration, partnering with regional and global Product leads.

You'll act as the connective tissue between global product teams and local markets, ensuring local requirements are properly scoped, prioritized, built, tested, and successfully deployed. You'll also build the playbooks, processes, and documentation that let PayJoy scale launches efficiently and compliantly across regions.

Responsibilities

Program Oversight & Execution

• Own the end-to-end planning and execution for launching PayJoy's financial products in LATAM and South African markets.

• Develop comprehensive project plans covering product definition, legal contracts, rollout strategy, and feature delivery timelines.

• Translate business and market requirements into clearly defined product and engineering deliverables.

• Partner with Product Managers to define MVP scope and success criteria.

• Maintain RAID log, decision log, and dependency map; run weekly execution reviews and milestone tracking.

• Drive sprint planning visibility for market-critical epics and unblock teams to hit milestones.

Engineering & Systems Coordination

• Work closely with Engineering to ensure backend systems, APIs, integrations, and configurations are ready for launch.

• Coordinate delivery of market-specific requirements (e.g., KYC flows, repayment logic, partner integrations, underwriting configurations) across geographies.

• Own the production readiness checklist: monitoring, logging, alerting, runbooks, on-call coverage, and escalation paths for launch.

• Coordinate readiness with local partners and vendors (KYC, lender, payments, collections) including certifications, SLAs, and integration timelines.

Testing & Launch Readiness

• Lead UAT, Friendly Sales testing, and pilot rollout or limited-market launch.

• Define test plans and acceptance criteria in partnership with Product and QA; develop and manage test case lists.

• Track defects, prioritize fixes, and ensure issues are resolved before go-live.

• Run launch readiness reviews with go/no-go criteria, including rollback and incident response readiness.

Documentation & Compliance

• Build and maintain a detailed Product Launch Playbook covering country/product combinations, so launches become repeatable and efficient across regions.

• Partner with Legal and Risk to gather local regulatory requirements and define product customizations for each market.

• Ensure all legal decisions, inputs, and audits are properly documented (e.g., in JIRA) and traceable.

Design & Localization Coordination

• Collaborate with Product Managers on feature backlogs and technical requirements, helping prioritize as needed.

• Partner with Design to ensure localized and translated assets and approvals are completed prior to launch.

Cross-Functional Alignment & Communication

• Serve as the primary technical program lead across Product, Engineering, Legal, Risk, Design, Operations, and country teams.

• Facilitate structured working sessions to align on priorities and resolve trade-offs.

• Provide weekly written updates to leadership (and Product Review updates) using a standard template covering status, risks, decisions needed, and timeline health.

• Maintain a scope change log and drive trade-off decisions using DACI or RACI.

Post-Launch Optimization

• Establish dashboards to monitor product performance post-launch (approvals, conversion, repayment performance, incident rate, error rate, latency, and funnel drop-off reasons).

• Partner with Product and Data to identify performance gaps, define a learning agenda, and build the iteration roadmap.

• Support rapid experimentation and UX/UI improvements following MVP release, tracking enhancements accordingly.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience in technical program management, ideally in fintech or lending.

• Strong technical fluency, comfortable driving API contracts, integration sequencing, observability requirements, and release governance.

• Experience launching 0→1 products in new markets or new verticals.

• Proven ability to manage complex cross-functional initiatives with multiple technical dependencies.

• Experience building repeatable playbooks, processes, and documentation that let launches scale.

• Comfortable partnering with Legal and Risk on regulatory requirements and market-specific product customizations.

• Highly organized, with strong written communication and stakeholder management skills.

• Comfortable operating in ambiguity and driving execution in fast-paced environments.

• Strong bias for written communication and structured execution (RAID, milestones), and driving alignment across markets and time zones.

• Fluency in English required; Spanish and/or Portuguese strongly preferred for LATAM markets. Experience working with global teams across multiple geographies a plus.

Benefits

• 100% Company-funded Health and dental and vision discount plan for employees and immediate family members.
  
• Life insurance.
• Phone finance, Headphone, home office equipment and wellness perks.
  
• 30 days of Christmas bonus
  
• 20 days paid Vacation
  
• 50% Vacation premium
  
• 13% Saving funds
  
• $2,000 MXN monthly grocery coupons
  
• $2,000 USD annual Co-working Travel perk
  
• $2,000 USD annual Professional Development perk
  
• Catered lunches