M-Pesa Africa: Technical Account Manager

Role Overview

You will own the technical roadmap and integration strategy for M-PESA Africa’s payment ecosystem, acting as the bridge between engineering, commercial teams, and external partners across multiple African markets. Your daily work involves scoping partner requirements, validating solution architectures, overseeing certification and launch milestones, then optimising live integrations for reliability and revenue growth. This role matters because every payment capability you ship directly expands the reach and commercial viability of M-PESA’s platform.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and maintain the integration product roadmap, prioritising features and capabilities based on partner demand, ecosystem value, and commercial return.
• Lead technical discovery and solution design for strategic partner integrations, covering merchant payments, collections, payouts, cross-border flows, banking rails, and card schemes.
• Manage the full partner lifecycle—from initial opportunity assessment and architecture reviews through sandbox certification, production launch, and post-go-live performance tuning.
• Collaborate with engineering squads to set integration standards, promote reusable API patterns, and ensure consistency in security, observability, and resilience across all payment services.
• Act as the internal subject-matter expert on payment messaging standards, settlement and reconciliation flows, and integration technologies, advising product and commercial teams on feasibility and trade-offs.
• Drive improvements to developer-facing tools, documentation, onboarding frameworks, and self-service capabilities to shorten integration time and improve partner satisfaction.
• Partner with commercial and business development teams to shape technical value propositions, estimate delivery effort, and support proposal development for enterprise customers and strategic partners.
• Champion a “build once, scale across markets” approach by standardising integration journeys while incorporating local regulatory and market-specific requirements.

Requirements & Qualifications

• Eight or more years of experience in payments, fintech, banking, or digital financial services, with a track record of solving complex, non-routine technical and commercial problems.
• Proven technical product leadership—including owning integration roadmaps, feature prioritisation, and lifecycle management—within a regulated financial environment.
• Deep domain knowledge across merchant and business payments, collections, payouts, cross-border transactions, settlement and reconciliation, and financial messaging standards such as ISO 8583, ISO 20022, and SWIFT.
• Hands-on familiarity with modern integration architectures: REST and SOAP APIs, API gateways, event-driven and microservices patterns, OAuth 2.0/OIDC/JWT, platform observability, and security best practices.
• Experience managing strategic partner integrations end-to-end, including solution architecture, certification, operational readiness, and launch in multi-market or multi-region settings.
• Strong stakeholder management and executive communication skills, with the ability to translate complex technical topics for engineering, commercial, and executive audiences alike.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, Business, or a related field.
• Desirable: professional certifications in product management, Agile, or enterprise architecture; experience with international payment providers, banks, card schemes, telecoms, or fintechs; exposure to pan-African or multinational operations; knowledge of Open Finance, Embedded Finance, or emerging payment technologies.