Senior Program Manager

About Paystack

Paystack’s mission is to accelerate digital payments on the continent of Africa. Over 200K of some of the most renowned businesses in Nigeria, as well as a growing number of merchants in South Africa, Ghana, and Kenya use Paystack’s modern payments gateway. They include the likes of Qatar Airways, MTN, Burger King, UPS, AXA Mansard Insurance, FilmHouse Cinemas, Smile Communications, Air Peace Airlines, Crocs, Under Armour, Richemont Lifestyle Group (RLG), and many others.

In just over 10 years, our growing team has introduced a steady cadence of innovation within the online payments landscape, such as automated recurring payments, the ability for customers to pay directly from their bank accounts, automated chargebacks, and much more. We’ve been acquired by Stripe and are doubling down on the mission to help build out Africa’s payments infrastructure.

Paystack builds technology to help Africa’s best businesses grow - from new startups, to market leaders launching new business models. We make it easy for businesses to accept secure payments from multiple local and global payment channels, and then we provide tools to help you retain existing customers, and acquire new ones.

You will be expected to:

• Own and drive execution of multiple high-priority programs across Infrastructure and Security (often in parallel), from initiation through delivery
• Partner closely with Engineering Managers and Product Managers to define goals, scope, success metrics, milestones, and delivery plans
• Flex across multiple domains, bringing the same execution rigour to a major infrastructure program as to a vulnerability management initiative or a compliance audit
• Act as the coordination layer between the Infrastructure and Security teams and Engineering, ensuring requests, projects, and dependencies are tracked, prioritised, and followed through
• Partner with the Security Compliance team to coordinate audit activities including aligning timelines across internal teams and external auditors, tracking evidence collection progress and ensuring remediation actions are captured and followed through to completion
• Build and maintain program plans (work breakdowns, schedules, dependency maps, RAID logs) and keep them current as constraints change
• Identify, track, and proactively mitigate risks and blockers; escalate early with clear options and trade-offs
• Drive cross-team alignment on technical approach, sequencing, and operational readiness for programs under delivery (testing, rollout, incident response, documentation)
• Run execution rituals (kickoffs, weekly program reviews, stakeholder updates, retrospectives) and ensure decisions and actions are captured and followed through
• Communicate progress clearly to stakeholders, including status, risks, scope changes, timelines, and outcomes
• Continuously improve delivery processes and tooling, including using AI-assisted workflows to automate project operations and accelerate problem-solving

The ideal candidate for this role will have:

• 6+ years of program/project management experience delivering complex, cross-functional initiatives (preferably in engineering organizations)
• Proven ability to manage multiple parallel workstreams, dependencies, and shifting priorities while maintaining delivery quality
• Experience partnering with Engineering Managers and Product Managers to drive execution, make trade-offs, and land outcomes. You will own the delivery plan, timeline and escalation path. Engineering managers own technical decisions and team capacity. You own scope and prioritisation. You are the person accountable for making sure these things stay aligned and that slips, conflicts and trade offs surface early
• Demonstrated ability to operate independently in ambiguous environments, define program structure from scratch, and bring order to complex cross-functional initiatives without being handed a playbook
• Strong understanding of infrastructure and security domains, with the ability to engage credibly with technical teams - for example: platform reliability and SLA management, observability and monitoring, networking fundamentals, CI/CD and deployment pipelines, IAM and access control, vulnerability management or compliance frameworks. Deep expertise in all areas is not expected, but you should be able to read an architecture diagram, follow post-mortem, understand the implications of a proposed change, and ask the right questions when something does not add up.
• Excellent stakeholder management skills: can influence without authority and align diverse teams toward shared goals
• Strong written and verbal communication, including crisp status reporting and executive-ready updates
• Demonstrated ability to create and operate lightweight delivery mechanisms (planning, tracking, reporting, retros) that increase throughput rather than bureaucracy
• Strong analytical thinking and structured problem-solving, including comfort with ambiguity and incomplete information
• A proactive approach to risk identification and mitigation before issues impact delivery
• Experience using AI tools to automate repetitive project operations (e.g., status synthesis, meeting notes, action tracking) and accelerate problem-solving
• You will be managing programs where requirements shift, teams are resource constrained, timelines are aggressive and technical complexity is high. Some of these programs will involve production systems handling real money, where getting rollout wrong has direct customer and regulatory impact

Beneficial

• Experience delivering infrastructure or security programs in a high-availability, high-scale environment
• Familiarity with security and compliance programs (e.g., PCI DSS, ISO 27001, ISO 27701), threat modelling, application security, incident management, and/or security operations
• Experience working in fintech, payments, or other regulated environments
• Technical background (engineering, SRE, security engineering, or equivalent) sufficient to understand architecture diagrams, logs/metrics, and engineering trade-offs
• Demonstrated use of AI-assisted tooling to improve program operations, delivery predictability, and team effectiveness

Soft Skills

• Impeccable stakeholder management and the ability to influence without authority
• Clear, structured communication (written and verbal), including concise status updates and decision documentation; comfortable pushing back when warranted.
• High agency: takes ownership, drives clarity, and unblocks teams proactively
• Strong facilitation skills for cross-team discussions, conflict resolution, and decision-making
• Calm, methodical execution under pressure, especially during high-severity incidents or tight deadlines
• Curiosity and adaptability: eager to learn new technical domains and improve delivery systems continuously