Technical Product Manager — Core Payments

Job description

| | | | --- | --- | | | **ABOUT YASSIR** | Yassir is the leading super app in the Maghreb region, set to change the way daily services are provided. It currently operates across Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, South Africa and Senegal. It is backed by ~$200M in funding from VCs across Silicon Valley, Europe and other parts of the world. We offer on-demand services such as ride-hailing and last-mile delivery. Building on this infrastructure, we are now introducing financial services to help our users pay, save and borrow digitally — helping usher the continent into a digital economy era. We’re not just about serving people; we’re about creating a marketplace that brings people what they need while infusing social values. ### ABOUT THE ROLE We are looking for a Technical Product Manager to join our Core Payments squad, working alongside our Senior PM to build and scale the engine that moves money across the Yassir platform. This is a hands-on, technical role at the heart of our financial infrastructure. Core Payments owns the systems every transaction depends on: the payment orchestration flow, the switch and PSP integrations, and reconciliation and settlement. Every payment on the platform — wallet-to-wallet, card, bill payment, interbank transfer — passes through the sequence of compliance, limit, balance, and ledger checks that this squad is responsible for. Correctness, resilience, and traceability are non-negotiable. **You will translate complex payment and ledger requirements into clear specs, work shoulder-to-shoulder with engineers on the design of transaction flows, and own the edge cases — retries, failures, reversals, and reconciliation — that make the difference between a payment system that works and one that loses money.** ### WHAT YOU'LL WORK ON A flavour of the problems this squad solves day to day: - Payment orchestration — the ordered sequence of checks (channel policy, entitlement, limits, balance, fees, sanctions, fraud, ledger post) that every transaction runs through before money moves. - Transaction routing across paths: internal wallet-to-wallet ledger posts, interbank transfers via the national switch, card payments via the scheme, and biller / bill-payment flows. - Failure handling and money safety — idempotent retries, suspense accounts, and preventing “ghost” payments where an external party is paid but the customer is never debited (or vice versa). - Switch and PSP integration — working with engineers on card authorisation flows, PSP failover, and the messaging between Yassir and external payment networks. - Reconciliation and settlement — making sure Yassir’s ledger matches the external world (billers, banks, schemes) and that breaks are surfaced and resolved. - Resilience — defining fallback behaviour when a downstream service is slow or down, so the payment path degrades safely instead of failing entirely. ### Responsibilities - Own a defined area of the Core Payments roadmap, working closely with the Senior PM and engineering leads on your squad. - Write clear, thorough technical specifications — API contracts, transaction flows, state transitions, error codes, and acceptance criteria — that engineers can build from without ambiguity. - Reason rigorously about edge cases: what happens on a timeout, a retry, a partial failure, a crash mid-transaction — and specify the correct behaviour for each. - Collaborate daily with engineers on system design; understand the tradeoffs well enough to challenge and be challenged, not just relay requirements. - Coordinate with adjacent squads — Compliance, Core Banking, and the channel teams — whose systems connect into the payment flow. - Partner with operations and finance on reconciliation, settlement, and how payment issues are detected and resolved in production. - Use data to monitor payment success rates, latency, and failure modes, and to prioritise what to fix or build next. - Facilitate agile ceremonies and keep your squad delivering to roadmap and quality goals. ### REQUIREMENTS - 3–5 years of product management experience, with meaningful time on technical or infrastructure products (payments, fintech, ledger, banking, or a comparable backend / platform domain). - Genuine technical depth: comfortable with APIs, data models, and system design discussions; able to read a spec, follow a transaction through multiple systems, and spot the gaps. - Strong grasp of how payments or financial transactions work end-to-end — authorisation, settlement, reconciliation, and the failure modes in between (or the ability to demonstrate you can learn this fast, backed by adjacent experience). - A track record of writing high-quality technical specs and working closely with engineering teams to ship reliable systems. - Precision and rigour — you care about correctness, edge cases, and getting the details right, because in payments the details are the product. - Ability to work with ambiguity and build in a fast-moving, from-scratch environment. - Knowledge of modern development practices like agile and scrum. - Excellent written and verbal communication, with the ability to make complex technical topics clear to non-technical stakeholders. - Based in Cairo, Egypt (required). - Fluent English and Arabic; French is an advantage. ### NICE TO HAVE - Direct experience with payment systems: card schemes (ISO 8583), interbank messaging (ISO 20022), switches, PSPs, or gateway integrations. - Understanding of double-entry ledgers, suspense accounts, and reconciliation. - Experience with idempotency, distributed-system failure handling, or transaction integrity patterns. - Exposure to compliance-adjacent product work — limits, sanctions screening, AML, or fraud. - A technical, engineering, or consulting background before product. At Yassir, we believe in the power of diversity and the importance of an inclusive culture. If you’re ready to bring your unique perspective and experiences to the table, we’re excited to listen. Don’t just apply for a job — come and be a part of our journey. Let’s create a better tomorrow together.