Senior Tech Strategy & Program Manager

This is Adyen

Adyen provides payments, data, and financial products in a single solution for customers like Meta, Uber, H&M, and Microsoft - making us the financial technology platform of choice. At Adyen, everything we do is engineered for ambition. 

For our teams, we create an environment with opportunities for our people to succeed, backed by the culture and support to ensure they are enabled to truly own their careers. We are motivated individuals who tackle unique technical challenges at scale and solve them as a team. Together, we deliver innovative and ethical solutions that help businesses achieve their ambitions faster.

Senior Tech Strategy & Program Manager

Adyen is looking for a forward-thinking Senior Tech Strategy & Program Manager to help shape the future direction and product excellence of our solutions. You will join the Tech Strategy & Execution team, serving as an upstream tech function focused on identifying future opportunities and driving strategic priorities across the organization. You are the bridge between commercial ambition and technical reality, ensuring that Adyen identifies the right strategic bets and defines the path to deliver them. You will work closely with senior leadership across Tech and Commercial to ensure our long-term vision is not just ambitious, but technically feasible and aligned with our customers' evolving needs.

In this role you will:

• Bridge Tech and Commercial: Act as the Tech counterpart to commercial strategy teams, ensuring a balanced perspective between business goals and technical reality, and translating commercial strategy & long-term vision into future product direction.
• Act as Upstream Tech Lead: Act as the initial product and technical strategy lead for new, undefined concepts and cross-solution initiatives—structuring the opportunity space, defining the problem, shaping the technical direction, and validating feasibility—before transitioning mature initiatives into dedicated solution teams.
• Solve Holistic Merchant Problems: Look beyond individual products to synthesize merchant problems across solutions, identifying collective "blind spots" in the merchant experience and building frameworks to track improvements.
• Drive Strategic Coordination: Shape and align strategic initiatives that cut across multiple solutions by clarifying trade-offs, surfacing system-level risks, and ensuring the technical direction remains coherent across the platform.
• Product Discovery: Ensure the Tech organization is prepared to meet future customer commitments, influencing deal readiness for high-stakes commercial scenarios and ensuring product requirements are captured early.

Who you are:

• Product Strategy: You have 5-7 years of experience in Product Management or Tech Strategy, specifically focused on shaping long-term product direction and future-scoping
• Systems Thinker: You think in systems, not features—understanding platform dependencies, architectural trade-offs, and how decisions in one solution affect the broader merchant experience
• Commercial-Tech Translator: You excel at bridging the gap between customer/commercial needs and the internal technical organization, translating feedback into actionable product strategy
• Entrepreneurial mindset: You are comfortable stepping into the unknown to lead new strategic bets before a formal team exists, driving them from concept to maturity
• Strategic Influencer: You can drive alignment and coordination for major initiatives across multiple distinct product areas without necessarily owning the day-to-day execution teams
• Clear Communicator: You can navigate high-stakes discussions with senior leadership and key stakeholders, providing clarity on dependencies, opportunities, and trade-offs
• You are energized by shaping the “Why” and “What” of strategic initiatives, and are comfortable influencing without direct authority. You operate effectively in ambiguity and know when to go deep and when to elevate the conversation to first principles. 

What Success Looks Like

• New opportunities are clearly framed, prioritized, and aligned before execution.
• Cross-team trade-offs are surfaced early and resolved pragmatically.
• Commercial ambition is matched with realistic technical strategy.
• Leadership has clear visibility into strategic direction and investment rationale.

Our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion commitments 

Our unique approach is a product of our diverse perspectives. This diversity of backgrounds and cultures is essential in helping us maintain our momentum. Our business and technical challenges are unique, and we need as many different voices as possible to join us in solving them - voices like yours. No matter who you are or where you’re from, we welcome you to be your true self at Adyen. 

Studies show that women and members of underrepresented communities apply for jobs only if they meet 100% of the qualifications. Does this sound like you? If so, Adyen encourages you to reconsider and apply. We look forward to your application!

What’s next?

Ensuring a smooth and enjoyable candidate experience is critical for us. We aim to get back to you regarding your application within 5 business days. Our interview process tends to take about 4 weeks to complete, but may fluctuate depending on the role. Learn more about our hiring process here. Don’t be afraid to let us know if you need more flexibility.

 

This role is based out of our Chicago office. We are an office-first company and value in-person collaboration; we do not offer remote-only roles.