Technical Program Manager 2

About the role

You own the plan and the technical programmes for a payments instrument. You decide the OKRs and priority of business tasks, new partners, mandates and platform work, and you make sure each initiative lands on time and desired specs. You run the team with its EM and staff engineer, who own how it is built, how it performs (technical SR, latency, uptime) and all technical work with partners. You own the teams plan, product readiness and merchant developer experience.

What you will do

• OKRs: Define the teams OKRs each quarter, such as cost per transaction, capability adoption, merchant integration time and mandate readiness. Align them with the EM's technical OKRs so the two add up to one plan. Own the outcome, not just the tracking.
• Team plan: Sequence the team’s plan with the EM, taking in asks from every Business Vertical PM/AMs. Say no clearly when needed, and bring unresolved conflicts to the joint CTO and Head of Product planning forum.
• Partners and vendors: Work with Banking Alliances on which banks, processors and networks the team needs, what they cost and what their roadmaps offer. Meet partner business teams, such as NPCI forums and bank product heads, alongside Alliances. Build the programme and cost case for adding or dropping a partner. Make integrations succeed after go-live: adoption, pilot results and cost targets.
• Instrument economics: Know the payment instrument’s cost by route and partner, work to reduce it.
• Requirements: Write requirements for large initiatives. Review API specs and designs from the EM and staff engineer for merchant integration experience.
• APIs and SDKs: Own the merchant developer experience for the team: docs, integration guides, error messages, SDK usability and deprecation plans.
• Mandates: Read RBI, NPCI and network circulars early, work out the impact on merchants and with Compliance, and run each mandate as a programme so requirements reach the EM well ahead of deadlines.
• Cross-team programmes: Run programmes that span several teams, such as changes that touch Risk and Finance systems.
• Merchant and business sense: Spot patterns across business PM/AMs, merchant and TAM signals and turn them into items on the team plan.
• People: Mentor TPM I colleagues and raise the bar for requirements, plans and programme reviews.

What we are looking for

• 2–4 years in technical programme management, solutions architecture or software engineering, with at least 1 year on payment or fintech systems.
• Strong API sense: you can review an API design for merchant experience, spot breaking changes and plan deprecations.
• Commercial sense: you understand partner charges, interchange and cost per transaction, and can build a cost case.
• Comfortable with data: SQL, dashboards, and breaking down adoption by partner and merchant segment.
• Clear decision-making and written reasoning: requirements, trade-off notes and plan calls that leadership acts on.
• Able to lead without authority across PMs, AMs, the EM, Alliances, Finance, TAM and Compliance, including saying no to a PM or AM with data.
• Educational Qualifications: Graduation or post-graduation from a tier-1 engineering college.

Nice to have

• Engineering background, such as having built backend services, integrations or payment systems.
• Experience with NPCI, network or bank certification, or with operating as a PA, PG, TSP or BBPOU.
• Experience setting OKRs for a team and running monthly reviews.

What success looks like

• By 3 months: You own the team's OKRs and plan, and stakeholders know how to bring work to you.
• By 6 months: OKRs are on track, mandate requirements reach the EM well before deadlines, and business asks move through a clear, predictable process.
• By 12 months: The team’s capability adoption has measurably improved. You are ready to mentor a TPM I or take on a second team, on the path to Senior TPM.