Senior Lead UPI Product Development

Role & responsibilities

The opportunity

NPCI is looking for a senior product leader to drive innovation,
platform evolution, and next-generation capability development
across the UPI ecosystem.
This role will be responsible for defining and executing the
innovation roadmap for UPI, enabling continuous platform
evolution to meet emerging ecosystem needs, scale requirements,
and future payment use cases. The incumbent will lead product
discovery, ecosystem experimentation, platform architecture
direction, and AI-enabled product acceleration to ensure UPI
remains at the forefront of digital payment innovation.
The role requires strong product leadership, platform thinking,
technology depth, ecosystem understanding, and execution
excellence. The candidate will work closely with engineering,
ecosystem participants, business stakeholders, and industry
leadership to drive scalable product innovation and operational
readiness.
This position also demands strong adoption thinking, platform
governance, AI-enabled product development capabilities, and
executive stakeholder management.

Key Skills & Experience Required
•12+ years of relevant experience in product management,
platform leadership, payments innovation, fintech, or digital
ecosystem product strategy
•Proven experience in leading large-scale platform product
initiatives and ecosystem-facing product innovation
programs
•Strong product discovery, roadmap strategy,
experimentation, and execution leadership capabilities
•Deep understanding of API product management, platform
scalability, and ecosystem integration design
•Strong collaboration skills across product, engineering,
architecture, operations, and leadership teams

• Experience operating in high-scale, high-velocity, mission-
  critical digital platform environments
  •Excellent stakeholder management, executive
  communication, and strategic influencing capabilities
  Demonstrated ability to mentor product teams and build
  organizational product leadership capability
  
  Job Responsibilities

Product Innovation Strategy & Roadmap Leadership
•Own and drive the innovation roadmap for new UPI
capabilities, platform enhancements, and ecosystem
evolution initiatives.
•Define strategic product outcomes, roadmap milestones,
ecosystem adoption targets, and innovation success
metrics.

• Identify emerging opportunities across payments, digital
  commerce, platform scalability, and ecosystem enablement
  to shape future UPI capabilities.
  •Ensure alignment between innovation priorities, ecosystem
  needs, and organizational strategic objectives.

Product Discovery & Ecosystem Experimentation

• Drive structured product discovery initiatives with banks,
  PSPs, TPAPs, merchants, fintechs, and ecosystem
  participants.
• Lead rapid experimentation programs to validate product
  concepts, use cases, ecosystem readiness, and adoption
  potential.
• Translate ecosystem insights, discovery outcomes, and
  experimentation learnings into build-ready product
  specifications and implementation plans.
• Establish repeatable discovery-to-execution frameworks for
  accelerated product innovation.

Platform Architecture & API Product Strategy

• Define and drive an API-first platform product strategy
  focused on scalability, integration simplicity,
  interoperability, and ecosystem adoption.
• Ensure platform evolution principles around backward
  compatibility, extensibility, modularity, and scale-by-design
  architecture.
• Work closely with engineering and architecture teams to
  align product strategy with technology platform
  capabilities.
• Drive ecosystem-friendly integration models that reduce
  implementation friction and improve partner onboarding
  velocity.

Engineering Partnership & Performance Excellence

• Partner closely with engineering teams to ensure platform
  readiness for scale, reliability, and performance demands.
• Drive product decisions that improve transaction
  performance metrics including authorization success rates
  (ASR), latency, throughput, and ecosystem resilience.
• Support surge readiness planning, performance engineering, and platform optimization initiatives tied to
  product evolution.
• Ensure product innovation balances customer experience,
  technical feasibility, ecosystem scalability, and operational
  reliability.

Product Development Lifecycle Governance

• Institutionalize strong Product Development Lifecycle
  (PDLC) governance across innovation initiatives.
• Define documentation standards, launch governance
  mechanisms, review frameworks, telemetry expectations,
  and release readiness processes.
• Establish structured post-launch learning loops, feedback
  capture mechanisms, and continuous improvement
  practices.
• Drive execution discipline across the product lifecycle from
  concept to launch and optimization.

Leadership & Ecosystem Representation

• Represent the UPI innovation roadmap in executive
  leadership discussions, industry forums, ecosystem
  engagements, and strategic governance platforms.
• Influence ecosystem stakeholders and internal leadership
  on future product direction and innovation priorities.
• Mentor Product Leads and strengthen second-line product
  leadership capability within the organization.
• Build a culture of innovation, experimentation, product
  excellence, and technology-led problem solving.

Required Technical Skills

•Strong expertise in digital payments platforms, UPI
ecosystem architecture, and API-driven platform models
•Deep understanding of product management frameworks,
platform product strategy, and innovation lifecycle
execution
•Strong familiarity with scalable distributed systems,
performance engineering considerations, and platform
reliability concepts
•Knowledge of transaction processing systems, payment
workflows, integration ecosystems, and interoperability
frameworks
•Understanding of telemetry, observability, product

analytics, experimentation frameworks, and release
governance mechanisms

AI & Data Capabilities

AI-Enabled Product Acceleration

• Leverage Generative AI for discovery synthesis,
  requirements drafting, specification refinement, risk
  analysis, and edge-case enumeration with appropriate
  governance controls.
• Accelerate product review cycles using AI-assisted
  documentation and specification workflows.
• Use AI-enabled tooling to improve product decision-making
  speed and execution efficiency.

Machine Learning-Driven Product Prioritization

• Apply data-driven and ML-assisted prioritization
  approaches using adoption trends, platform reliability
  indicators, ecosystem integration complexity, and
  implementation cost signals.
• Drive intelligent roadmap prioritization using measurable
  ecosystem and platform performance insights.

AI-Assisted Observability & Reliability Intelligence

• Enable AI-assisted observability frameworks for automated
  log summarization, issue clustering, regression detection,
  and incident intelligence.
• Collaborate with engineering and reliability teams to
  improve operational visibility through intelligent monitoring
  capabilities.

AI-Driven Experimentation & Product Validation

• Prototype faster using AI-enabled product design
  workflows, experimentation analysis, and user journey
  simulations.
• Reduce time-to-validation for new product ideas through
  AI-assisted experimentation and rapid iteration approaches.