Senior Technical Program Manager at Ezra · Nairobi

About the role

The Senior Technical Program Manager owns end-to-end delivery of technology initiatives and raises the standard for how we plan, build, and ship. Taking a structured, data-driven view of the delivery lifecycle, you'll re-engineer how teams prioritise, build, test, and release to drive predictability and consistency , bringing clear plans, honest reporting, managed risk, and a focus on unblocking teams.

Contribution & Impact

This role is critical to the efficient, predictable, and high-quality delivery of our core lending, value store & transfer, and data platforms. The role will improve delivery velocity, predictability, and the timely deployment of growth-enabling capabilities. It does this by improving how our systems and processes fit together, and by coordinating execution across teams and dependencies rather than owning a single delivery lane. Success will be measured by on-time and cost-effective delivery of key initiatives, improved delivery cycle times, effective management of dependencies and risks, platform stability and performance, and maintaining architectural alignment towards a shared and scalable target state.

Key responsibilities

Project leadership and delivery orchestration

• Own the delivery of large, multi-team technology programs from definition through to production, including platform modernisation, data initiatives, cloud and AI-enabled systems.
• Define, document and agree program deliverables, requirements, resourcing and success criteria with technology and business stakeholders.
• Coordinate across Engineering, QA, Platform, teams to sequence work, manage dependencies and remove blockers.
• Maintain a clear, honest view of delivery health, surfacing risks and issues to Technology leadership early and with a recommended course of action.
• Establish technical governance frameworks that balance delivery speed with long-term architectural scalability.

Architectural direction and technical standards

• Work with the Technology Delivery Director to define and communicate the target architecture for the lending, data and customer value platforms, and translate it into a sequenced, deliverable roadmap.
• Ensure non-functional requirements (resilience, high availability, performance, security, observability, data quality) are designed in and delivered.
• Identify systemic architectural risk and technical debt, make its cost visible, and get remediation into the plan.
• Evaluate and pilot emerging technologies and practices, including AI-enabled and cloud-native tooling, where they serve the business.
• Transform manual or fragmented delivery processes into scalable, data-driven systems that empower teams to ship with confidence.

Process engineering and Agile enablement

• Champion the adoption of Agile practices across Technology and partner business teams, adapting them pragmatically to Ezra's context rather than applying frameworks by the book.
• Introduce and facilitate the ceremonies that matter – planning, reviews, retrospectives – and coach teams and stakeholders on the principles behind them.
• Diagnose where the delivery system is failing: handoffs, approval bottlenecks, unclear ownership, weak requirements, poor estimation — and redesign the process to fix it.
• Define and monitor delivery metrics (throughput, cycle time, predictability, escaped defects) and use them to drive real improvement, not reporting theatre.
• Drive consistency in documentation, workflows and technical decision-making across programs.

Team leadership and mentorship

• Mentor and support engineers and technical leads in planning, estimation, risk management and stakeholder communication.
• Foster a culture of transparency, accountability, technical rigor and continuous improvement.

Stakeholder communication and reporting

• Develop and agree stakeholder and communication plans for each major program.
• Provide structured, decision-useful updates on progress, risk and dependency to leadership and, where relevant, to partners and customers.
• Manage expectations and maintain alignment between technical teams and business stakeholders, including when the message is unwelcome.

Governance, risk and compliance

• Establish and run appropriate governance forums, with proportionate rigor enough control to be safe, not so much that delivery stalls.
• Proactively identify systemic delivery and operational risk, drive alignment on categorization and treatment, and co-own the outcome.

Qualifications and experience

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, IT or a related field.
• 7+ years of experience in technical program, project or delivery management , Architecture, team management within software or platform engineering environments, including experience running multi-team programmes.
• An engineering background, significant time spent as a software engineer, architect or technical lead, with strong expertise in at least one and familiarity with several programming languages.
• Demonstrated ability to lead and improve delivery processes, including guiding teams or organizations through Agile adoption or similar change.
• Solid understanding of Agile methodologies (Scrum, Kanban, XP) and the judgement to know when and how to apply them.
• Proficiency with project and service management tooling (e.g. Jira, Confluence)
• Experience leading or mentoring others, formally or informally.
• Exceptional communication, facilitation and influencing skills, with a track record of driving complex technical decisions across multiple teams.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience in a regulated FinTech, payments or financial services environment.
• Experience delivering in high-volume, high-availability transactional environments.
• Experience working across multiple countries, time zones or partner organizations.
• Lifecycle Management: Experience driving end-to-end technical projects, managing product development lifecycles from conception/prototype to release or end-of-life

The ideal candidate is someone who

• Think architecturally. Understands systems, not just schedules. Can define a target state, reason about how the pieces fit together, and see where the real technical and delivery risk sits.
• Is technically credible. Earns the respect of senior engineers because they understand the work and have done it, not because of the title.
• Engineers the process. Sees ways of working as a system to be diagnosed and improved, and has the discipline to measure whether the change worked.
• Handles ambiguity. Comfortable being handed a poorly-defined problem, a hard deadline and competing stakeholders, and turning that into a plan.
• Leads without needing authority. Builds alignment across engineering, product and business by influence, clarity and follow-through.
• Is direct and honest. Surfaces bad news early with a recommendation attached. Does not manage an optimistic status report.
• Develops people. Takes real satisfaction in growing a team and lifting the standard around them.
• Embraces evolution. Stays current with industry practice and helps the organisation adopt new approaches — including AI and cloud-native tooling — without destabilising the core platform.

Company overview

Ezra provides B2B digital lending solutions for emerging markets in partnership with mobile and digital wallet operators and financial service providers. Ezra supports 24 operations in 23 countries across Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Our key office locations are in Nairobi, Kenya and Dubai, UAE.

Our flagship products are Airtime Credit Services (ACS), Nano and BNPL.

• ACS is an airtime or data advance offered to prepaid mobile subscribers at the point of low credit.
• Nano is a micro cash advance offered to mobile wallet users on demand.
• BNPL facilitates payment installments for products and services.

As a FinTech company, our business is entirely technology and data driven — from determining subscriber eligibility, generating relevant offers, managing risk, loan issuance and recovery, through to performance optimization, reporting, reconciliation and billing.

Each day we process approximately 21M loan requests and 1.4 TB of data across our markets. This process needs to be robust, reliable and secure.

But it doesn't end there. We're exploring new ways of using our platform and transactional data to improve our products and develop new product opportunities.