Product Manager, Payments Ops – Settlement, Reconciliation & Partner SLA

Job Location: Nairobi
Department : Product
Reporting to: Head of Product

Role summary
Own the operational health of Watu’s payments across markets. This internal-facing role ensures payments are collected correctly and booked successfully, predictably and timely through settlement performance routines, reconciliation operations, SLA enforcement, and incident response leadership.

Key responsibilities

• Settlement performance and recovery
  • Define settlement cadence and settlement readiness by partner and market
  • Own daily settlement monitoring, delayed payments recovery, and escalation playbooks
  • Drive corrective actions with partners and internal teams to reduce recurring settlement failures
• Ensure successful payment booking connects to customer outcomes (eg: reloack timestamp updates etc)
• Reconciliation operations and exception closure discipline
  • Own reconciliation exception taxonomy, queue workflows, and closure SLAs
  • Drive root-cause tagging and prevention backlog governance
  • Coordinate with Engineering/Data/Build PM to eliminate recurring exception patterns
• Partner SLA governance and operational controls
  • Build partner SLA scorecards and run monthly SLA reviews with corrective action plans
  • Enforce operating procedures and escalation discipline for underperformance
  • Maintain partner operational runbooks, escalation matrices, and evidence pack standards (eg: backend logs, etc) for disputes
• Payments incidents and customer impact reduction
  • Run the payments incident process: triage, escalation, comms, and postmortems
  • Maintain prevention backlog tracking and ensure closure on permanent fixes
  • Reduce payment-related customer impact through stronger controls, faster detection, and operational hygiene

Ideal background

• Payments operations experience: settlement, reconciliation, exception management, partner performance governance
• Strong analytical mindset; comfort with operational scorecards and closure discipline
• Comfortable owning operational routines and cross-functional escalation
• Ability to translate operational pain into measurable process and tooling improvements

What we are looking for:

Education level: 

• Bachelor’s degree (Computer science degree preferred) from an accredited institution or equivalent experience with demonstrated proficiency

Experience: 

• Proven experience, 5+ years, in the fintech, telco or equivalent with senior-level engagement and relationship building.
• A minimum of 5 years’ management experience, having worked across technical, commercial, and customer-facing environments within the technology industry - particularly telcos and fintech.
• Demonstrated experience in product management, product marketing, partnership management, business development, or related roles with a track record of successfully establishing strategic alliances.

Technical skills: 

• Fintech, mobile wallets and mobile operator APIs
• Excellent product and technical instincts about mobile applications, web technologies and product development
• Experience using Jira, Confluence and other Atlassian tools for product management and familiarity with other tools such as Jira, Trello, Miro etc
• Ability to measure and analyze key performance indicators
• Understanding of the software development cycle and familiarity with Agile Principles
• Exceptional negotiation and contract management skills, with the ability to create win-win scenarios in complex partnerships.
• Strong strategic thinking abilities, including the capacity to analyze market trends, competitive landscapes, and potential opportunities for collaboration.

Behavioral skills: 

• You demonstrate exceptional stakeholder management and relationship-building skills, including effectively managing expectations and obtaining agreement on key objectives.
• Ability to quickly strike a rapport with strangers and build meaningful and lasting business relationships
• Proven track record of integrity while managing business transactions
• Embraces, leads and embeds change
• Must actively demonstrate the values of Watu; Strong Ethics and Standards.
• Motivates, coaches and develops the team
• Excellent multi-tasking skills
• Problem-solving, Creative and Critical thinking skills
• Goal orientation, ability to focus and get things done in fuzzy environments
• Great interpersonal, communication and presentation skills

Equal Opportunity Statement

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity in our workplace.
All qualified applicants will receive consideration for this position without regard to age, gender, disability, religion, or any other status protected under the Employment Act (Kenya).

All personal information provided will be handled in accordance with the Kenya Data Protection Act, 2019 and used solely for recruitment purposes.