Technical Product Manager - Payment Integrations

Role Overview

PayJustNow is South Africa's leading buy-now-pay-later platform, processing millions of transactions across a growing network of online and in-store merchants. Our payment integrations layer — the APIs, SDKs, webhooks, and gateway connections that power every transaction — is foundational infrastructure, and keeping it fast, reliable, and extensible is a core engineering and product priority.

We're looking for a Technical Product Manager to own this integrations platform end-to-end. This is a deeply technical role: you will define API contracts, own the developer experience for merchant integrations, drive architectural decisions on the integrations layer, and work shoulder-to-shoulder with Engineering on system design, reliability, and platform evolution.

This is not a role for someone who bridges business and tech from a distance. You will be in the detail — reviewing API specs, participating in architecture reviews, writing precise technical requirements, and holding the bar on integration quality. You will also translate that technical depth into commercial outcomes, working closely with Merchant Success, Commercial, and Compliance to ensure the integrations platform drives merchant growth and operational excellence.

What you’ll be responsible for:

Platform strategy and technical roadmap

• Own the product vision and technical roadmap for PayJustNow's integrations platform — covering the public API, SDKs, webhook infrastructure, merchant plugins, gateway connections, and payment rail connectivity.
• Drive the API strategy — versioning, deprecation policy, backwards compatibility, and the developer experience for merchants integrating with PayJustNow.
• Define and own the integration architecture strategy in close partnership with Engineering — making informed build vs. buy vs. partner decisions and setting the technical direction for platform scalability and extensibility.
• Track evolving payment standards (3DS2, tokenisation, open banking, card scheme mandates, ISO 20022) and translate compliance requirements into precise technical roadmap items.
• Own the platform's non-functional requirements — latency SLAs, uptime targets, throughput capacity, security posture (PCI-DSS, TLS standards), and failover behaviour.

Delivery and Technical Execution

• Conduct deep technical discovery across the integrations stack — audit existing APIs, review integration error logs, analyse failure modes, and map technical debt.
• Work directly with Engineering to understand root causes of transaction failures, integration degradation, and merchant-reported issues at a system level.
• Evaluate third-party gateway and PSP APIs — assessing capabilities, reliability, documentation quality, and certification requirements — to inform build vs. partner decisions.
• Identify and document integration gaps that are blocking merchant acquisition or expansion, translating commercial inputs into precise technical problem statements.
• Lead proof-of-concept work alongside Engineering to de-risk new integration patterns or architectural approaches before committing to full delivery.

Delivery and Technical Execution

• Author detailed technical product requirements — API specs (OpenAPI/Swagger), data models, sequence diagrams, error handling schemas, and webhook payload definitions.
• Lead cross-functional delivery squads through the full integration lifecycle: design, build, QA, certification, and production rollout for APIs, SDKs, and merchant plugins (WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, etc.).
• Define and enforce integration quality standards — test coverage expectations, sandbox environments, API contract testing, and developer documentation requirements.
• Own the incident response process for integration failures — triaging production issues, coordinating Engineering response, and leading post-mortems to drive systemic fixes.
• Manage PSP and gateway technical relationships — driving certification processes, escalating reliability issues, and influencing partner roadmaps.
  

Stakeholder Collaboration

• Serve as the technical authority for PayJustNow's integrations platform — the person Engineering, Commercial, and Merchant Success rely on for integration decisions.
• Communicate system complexity and architectural trade-offs clearly to non-technical stakeholders and senior leadership.
• Support the commercial and sales process with technical integration assessments — capability mapping, feasibility timelines, and integration effort sizing for prospective merchants.
• Engage with PSP and gateway partners at both technical and commercial levels — influencing their roadmaps and securing early access to new capabilities.

Measurement and Reliability

• Define and own the platform's technical health metrics, including:
• Transaction success rate (TSR) by gateway and merchant segment
• API error rates, latency percentiles (p50/p95/p99), and uptime SLAs
• Integration time-to-live for new merchant onboarding
• Webhook delivery success rate and retry performance
• Gateway-level authorisation rates and decline reason analysis
• Run regular reliability reviews — proactively identifying degradation trends before they become incidents or commercial problems.
• Champion engineering excellence in the integrations layer: drive down technical debt, improve observability, and establish clear on-call and escalation protocols.

What we’re looking for:

Experience:

• 5+ years' experience in a technical product management role — owning API platforms, integrations infrastructure, or developer-facing products.
• Deep familiarity with RESTful API design, webhook architectures, OAuth/authentication patterns, and API versioning strategies.
• Hands-on experience in payments — gateway integrations, PSP relationships, card scheme rules (Visa/Mastercard), and payment rail connectivity.
• Proven track record writing high-quality technical specifications: API contracts (OpenAPI/Swagger), data models, sequence diagrams, and system design documents.
• Experience with merchant plugin ecosystems (Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, or similar) is a strong advantage.
• Comfortable with PCI-DSS requirements, tokenisation, and operating in regulated financial services environments.

Technical skills and strength

• Able to read and write API specifications, review pull requests for product correctness, and engage in architecture discussions as a peer — not just an observer.
• Proficient with developer tooling: API testing tools (Postman, Insomnia), log analysis (Datadog, Splunk, or equivalent), and familiarity with CI/CD concepts.
• Understands distributed systems concepts relevant to payments: idempotency, eventual consistency, retry logic, circuit breakers, and failover patterns.
• Data-fluent — able to write SQL or work with analytics platforms to interrogate transaction data, error rates, and performance metrics directly.
• Strong technical writer — produces clear, precise specifications that Engineering can build from without ambiguity.

Mindset

• Reliability-obsessed — you understand that every percentage point of TSR improvement has direct commercial value, and you hold the bar on platform stability.
• Technically humble — you work with engineers as a peer, earn trust through precision and follow-through, and know when to defer to engineering judgement.
• Commercially connected — you don't get lost in technical detail; you always trace engineering decisions back to merchant experience and business outcomes.
• Systematic thinker — you approach complex integration problems methodically, document clearly, and build platforms designed to scale.
• Pragmatic — you know when to invest in architectural correctness and when to ship a pragmatic fix while tracking the debt.
• AI-enabled — you actively use a range of modern AI tools (including Claude, Cursor, and AI coding assistants) as part of how you work daily: to write sharper specs, research integration patterns, synthesise incident data, and accelerate problem-solving. Fluency across the current AI landscape is a baseline expectation, not a differentiator.
• Committed to the craft — you invest in your development as a PM through books, communities, and engagement with leading practitioners. You can articulate the frameworks and mental models — from API design principles to continuous discovery — that guide how you work.

Why This Role at PayJustNow

The integrations platform is the technical backbone of PayJustNow. Every merchant that goes live, every transaction that succeeds, and every new payment channel we enter depends on it. This role gives you genuine ownership of critical infrastructure — with the technical depth, commercial stakes, and engineering partnership to make it one of the most impactful technical product roles in South African fintech.