Senior Technical Program Manager
2026-08-14T05:47:12+00:00
Ezra
https://cdn.greatkenyanjobs.com/jsjobsdata/data/employer/comp_9697/logo/download.png
https://ezra.world/
FULL_TIME
Nairobi
Nairobi
00100
Kenya
Consulting
Computer & IT,Management,Business Operations
2026-08-21T17:00:00+00:00
8
Ezra is a financial technology company that partners with banks, MNOs, utility companies and e-commerce platforms to deliver easy and rapid credit solutions in emerging and financially underserved markets. Thanks to our expertise and unique credit scoring capabilities, we can offer a wide range of credit solutions including airtime credit, embedded financ...
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Agile methodologies (Scrum, Kanban, XP)
- Project and service management tooling (e.g. Jira, Confluence)
- Communication, facilitation and influencing skills
- Technical leadership
- Risk management
- Stakeholder communication
- Architectural direction
- Process engineering
- Agile enablement
- Team leadership and mentorship
- Governance, risk and compliance
- 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.
- 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
JOB-6a7eabe03ef23
Vacancy title:
Senior Technical Program Manager
[Type: FULL_TIME, Industry: Consulting, Category: Computer & IT,Management,Business Operations]
Jobs at:
Ezra
Deadline of this Job:
Friday, August 21 2026
Duty Station:
Nairobi | Nairobi
Summary
Date Posted: Friday, August 14 2026, Base Salary: Not Disclosed
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JOB DETAILS:
Ezra is a financial technology company that partners with banks, MNOs, utility companies and e-commerce platforms to deliver easy and rapid credit solutions in emerging and financially underserved markets. Thanks to our expertise and unique credit scoring capabilities, we can offer a wide range of credit solutions including airtime credit, embedded financ...
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.
Work Hours: 8
Experience in Months: 12
Level of Education: bachelor degree
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