Role Overview:

PayJustNow is South Africa's leading buy-now-pay-later platform, enabling seamless, interest-free payments across a growing network of online and in-store merchants. As we scale, the reliability, breadth, and quality of our payment integrations are core to our competitive advantage and merchant experience.

We're looking for a Product Manager to own the Payment Integrations product — the layer that connects PayJustNow to merchants, payment gateways, PSPs, and financial rails. This role is central to our ability to onboard merchants at speed, maintain high transaction success rates, and expand into new payment channels and geographies.

You will work closely with Engineering, Commercial, Merchant Success, Finance, and Compliance to build and operate a best-in-class integrations platform — balancing stability and reliability with the pace of new capability delivery.

What You’ll Be Responsible For:

Product Strategy & Roadmap

• Own the product vision and roadmap for PayJustNow's payment integrations layer — covering gateway connections, merchant plugins, API integrations, and payment rail connectivity.
• Identify and prioritise integration opportunities that unlock merchant growth, improve transaction success rates, or reduce integration friction and time-to-live.
• Define and own the integration architecture strategy — balancing build, buy, and partner decisions across the integrations ecosystem.
• Stay close to evolving payment standards (e.g. 3DS2, open banking, card scheme mandates) and ensure PayJustNow remains compliant and competitive.

Discovery & Problem Definition

• Deeply understand the merchant integration journey — from initial API connection and plugin install through to live transaction processing.
• Identify where integrations fail, degrade, or create friction for merchants — and build solutions that reduce time-to-value and integration complexity.
• Work with Commercial and Merchant Success to capture integration gaps blocking new merchant acquisition or expansion.
• Use transaction data, error logs, and merchant feedback to identify reliability and performance issues before they become commercial problems.

Delivery & Execution

• Lead cross-functional delivery squads to design, build, and ship integration capabilities — including APIs, SDKs, plugins (WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, etc.), and direct gateway connections.
• Write clear product briefs, integration specs, and developer-facing documentation standards.
• Manage third-party PSP and gateway relationships from a product perspective — ensuring integrations are maintained, certified, and performing.
• Drive the reliability and uptime of the integrations layer — owning incident response protocols alongside Engineering.

Stakeholder Collaboration

• Act as the primary product partner for Commercial, Merchant Success, Finance, and Engineering on all integration-related decisions.
• Communicate clearly on integration status, risks, and roadmap priorities to senior leadership.
• Support the sales process by providing integration timelines, capability overviews, and technical feasibility assessments for prospective merchants.
• Engage with gateway and PSP partners to influence roadmaps and secure early access to new capabilities.

Measurement & Continuous Improvement

• Define and track success metrics, including:
• Transaction success rate (TSR) and decline reasons
• Integration time-to-live for new merchants
• API uptime and error rates
• Gateway-level authorisation rates
• Integration coverage across key merchant platforms
• Use data to continuously improve integration reliability, reduce failure rates, and optimise payment performance.
  
  First 90 Days – What Success Looks Like
  
  First 30 Days: Understand & Connect
• Build strong relationships with Engineering, Commercial, Merchant Success, Finance, and Compliance.
• Deeply understand the current integrations landscape — active gateways, merchant plugins, API versions, and known pain points.
• Review current integration error rates, TSRs, and the merchant onboarding funnel to establish baseline performance.
• Map the existing roadmap, in-flight integrations, and technical debt in the integrations layer.

Days 31–60: Shape & Prioritise

• Articulate the integration product strategy — what to build, maintain, deprecate, and partner on.
• Define priority integrations based on commercial impact and merchant demand.
• Establish a clear framework for integration certification, versioning, and deprecation.
• Align Engineering and Commercial teams around a shared integration roadmap.

Days 61–90: Deliver & Lead

• Ship at least one meaningful integration improvement — whether a new gateway connection, plugin release, or reliability fix.
• Demonstrate early commercial impact through improved merchant onboarding speed or transaction performance data.
• Establish clear operating rhythms with Engineering and Merchant Success.
• Be recognised as the go-to product owner for PayJustNow's payment integrations.
  
  

What We’re Looking For

Experience

• 5+ years' experience as a Product Manager, with significant exposure to payment systems, integrations platforms, or developer-facing products.
• Demonstrable experience owning API or platform products — ideally in payments, fintech, or e-commerce.
• Familiarity with payment rails, gateway integrations, PSP relationships, and card scheme rules (Visa/Mastercard).
• Experience working across merchant plugin ecosystems (Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, or similar) is a strong advantage.
• Comfortable operating in regulated environments with PCI-DSS, AML, and compliance considerations.

Skills & Strengths

• Technically fluent — able to read API documentation, engage meaningfully with engineers on integration design, and write clear technical specs.
• Strong commercial instincts — understands how integration quality and speed-to-live directly impact revenue and merchant retention.
• Data-driven — uses transaction data, error logs, and performance metrics to diagnose problems and prioritise solutions.
• Clear communicator — able to translate technical integration complexity into language that resonates with commercial and merchant-facing teams.
• Strong prioritisation skills across competing integration demands from multiple merchants and stakeholders.

Mindset

• Obsessed with reliability — you understand that integration downtime is commercial downtime.
• Developer-empathetic — you think about the experience of technical and non-technical merchants integrating with PayJustNow.
• Pragmatic and delivery-oriented — you know how to ship incremental improvements while managing longer-term platform investments.
• Commercially curious — you connect integration decisions to business outcomes.
  
  

Why This Role at PayJustNow

Payment integrations are the foundation of everything PayJustNow does. This role gives you direct ownership of the infrastructure that connects PayJustNow to hundreds of merchants and millions of transactions. The right person will meaningfully improve how merchants go live, how transactions succeed, and how PayJustNow competes across new channels and markets.