Senior Technical Program Manager at Ezra

About the role

• The Senior Technical Program Manager owns end-to-end delivery of technology initiatives and raises the standard for how we plan, build, and ship. Taking a structured, data-driven view of the delivery lifecycle, you'll re-engineer how teams prioritise, build, test, and release to drive predictability and consistency , bringing clear plans, honest reporting, managed risk, and a focus on unblocking teams. 

Contribution & Impact

• This role is critical to the efficient, predictable, and high-quality delivery of our core lending, value store & transfer, and data platforms. The role will improve delivery velocity, predictability, and the timely deployment of growth-enabling capabilities.
• It does this by improving how our systems and processes fit together, and by coordinating execution across teams and dependencies rather than owning a single delivery lane. Success will be measured by on-time and cost-effective delivery of key initiatives, improved delivery cycle times, effective management of dependencies and risks, platform stability and performance, and maintaining architectural alignment towards a shared and scalable target state.

Key responsibilities

Project leadership and delivery orchestration

• Own the delivery of large, multi-team technology programs from definition through to production, including platform modernisation, data initiatives, cloud and AI-enabled systems.
• Define, document and agree program deliverables, requirements, resourcing and success criteria with technology and business stakeholders.
• Coordinate across Engineering, QA, Platform, teams to sequence work, manage dependencies and remove blockers.
• Maintain a clear, honest view of delivery health, surfacing risks and issues to Technology leadership early and with a recommended course of action.
• Establish technical governance frameworks that balance delivery speed with long-term architectural scalability.

Architectural direction and technical standards

• Work with the Technology Delivery Director to define and communicate the target architecture for the lending, data and customer value platforms, and translate it into a sequenced, deliverable roadmap.
• Ensure non-functional requirements (resilience, high availability, performance, security, observability, data quality) are designed in and delivered.
• Identify systemic architectural risk and technical debt, make its cost visible, and get remediation into the plan.
• Evaluate and pilot emerging technologies and practices, including AI-enabled and cloud-native tooling, where they serve the business.
• Transform manual or fragmented delivery processes into scalable, data-driven systems that empower teams to ship with confidence.

Process engineering and Agile enablement

• Champion the adoption of Agile practices across Technology and partner business teams, adapting them pragmatically to Ezra's context rather than applying frameworks by the book.
• Introduce and facilitate the ceremonies that matter – planning, reviews, retrospectives – and coach teams and stakeholders on the principles behind them.
• Diagnose where the delivery system is failing: handoffs, approval bottlenecks, unclear ownership, weak requirements, poor estimation — and redesign the process to fix it.
• Define and monitor delivery metrics (throughput, cycle time, predictability, escaped defects) and use them to drive real improvement, not reporting theatre.
• Drive consistency in documentation, workflows and technical decision-making across programs.

Team leadership and mentorship

• Mentor and support engineers and technical leads in planning, estimation, risk management and stakeholder communication.
• Foster a culture of transparency, accountability, technical rigor and continuous improvement.

Stakeholder communication and reporting

• Develop and agree stakeholder and communication plans for each major program.
• Provide structured, decision-useful updates on progress, risk and dependency to leadership and, where relevant, to partners and customers.
• Manage expectations and maintain alignment between technical teams and business stakeholders, including when the message is unwelcome.

Governance, risk and compliance

• Establish and run appropriate governance forums, with proportionate rigor enough control to be safe, not so much that delivery stalls.
• Proactively identify systemic delivery and operational risk, drive alignment on categorization and treatment, and co-own the outcome.

Qualifications and experience

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, IT or a related field.
• 7+ years of experience in technical program, project or delivery management , Architecture, team management within software or platform engineering environments, including experience running multi-team programmes.
• An engineering background, significant time spent as a software engineer, architect or technical lead, with strong expertise in at least one and familiarity with several programming languages.
• Demonstrated ability to lead and improve delivery processes, including guiding teams or organizations through Agile adoption or similar change.
• Solid understanding of Agile methodologies (Scrum, Kanban, XP) and the judgement to know when and how to apply them.
• Proficiency with project and service management tooling (e.g. Jira, Confluence)
• Experience leading or mentoring others, formally or informally.
• Exceptional communication, facilitation and influencing skills, with a track record of driving complex technical decisions across multiple teams.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience in a regulated FinTech, payments or financial services environment.
• Experience delivering in high-volume, high-availability transactional environments.
• Experience working across multiple countries, time zones or partner organizations.
• Lifecycle Management: Experience driving end-to-end technical projects, managing product development lifecycles from conception/prototype to release or end-of-life

The ideal candidate is someone who

• Think architecturally. Understands systems, not just schedules. Can define a target state, reason about how the pieces fit together, and see where the real technical and delivery risk sits.
• Is technically credible. Earns the respect of senior engineers because they understand the work and have done it, not because of the title.
• Engineers the process. Sees ways of working as a system to be diagnosed and improved, and has the discipline to measure whether the change worked.
• Handles ambiguity. Comfortable being handed a poorly-defined problem, a hard deadline and competing stakeholders, and turning that into a plan.
• Leads without needing authority. Builds alignment across engineering, product and business by influence, clarity and follow-through.
• Is direct and honest. Surfaces bad news early with a recommendation attached. Does not manage an optimistic status report.
• Develops people. Takes real satisfaction in growing a team and lifting the standard around them.
• Embraces evolution. Stays current with industry practice and helps the organisation adopt new approaches — including AI and cloud-native tooling — without destabilising the core platform.