Product Manager: Platform & Transactions

Location: Cape Town, hybrid · Type: Permanent, full-time · Reports to: Chief Product Officer

About Lesaka

Lesaka Technologies is a Southern African fintech building the connected ecosystem for financial inclusion — transactional banking, lending, insurance, payments and cash management for merchants, consumers and enterprise clients across the region. We’re publicly listed (Nasdaq: LSAK / JSE: LSK) and growing fast. EasyPay powers airtime, data, electricity, vouchers and 600+ bill payments through the largest retail footprint in South Africa.

The role

This role owns the engine every product rides on. A voucher purchase, an electricity token and a bill payment are all, underneath, a transaction that must authorise, reconcile and settle reliably. You own that shared capability across all verticals- reliability, integrations, scale and cost-to-serve, so the products don’t each solve the same plumbing problem three different ways.

What you’ll own

• Drive transaction success rates, latency and uptime across every product vertical.
• Own the integration roadmap, new payment methods, aggregators and partner APIs with reusable patterns that cut onboarding time.
• Define the non-functional requirements (throughput, latency, failover) that engineering builds against.
• Benchmark our rails against the market- settlement speed, failure rates, payment-method coverage and close the gaps that matter.
• Drive cost-to-serve down through smarter routing and retry/recovery frameworks.
• Filter genuine systemic reliability problems from one-off incidents, and prioritise accordingly.

What you bring

• 3+ years in product management on platform, payments, transactional or infrastructure products.
• Strong grasp of transaction flows, integrations and non-functional requirements.
• Ability to read transaction and failure data and turn it into a prioritised roadmap.
• Confidence partnering closely with engineering on architecture trade-offs without owning the sprint.
• A reliability and cost mindset you treat uptime and unit economics as product features.

Nice to have

• Experience with payment switches, aggregators or token vending.
• Exposure to high-volume, low-latency transaction environments.

Our culture — what we expect from you

Lesaka is a fast-paced fintech. The people who thrive here have a few things in common:

• You don’t wait to be asked. If something is broken or unclear, you call for the ball and fix it.
• Fast adaptation. Priorities shift, markets move, regulations change. You don’t flinch, you re-plan and move.
• Execution mindset. Ideas are cheap. Shipping is the job. You walk slow, run fast: think it through, then move with urgency.
• Customer first. The merchant, consumer or enterprise client is why we exist. Your decisions trace back to them.

If you’d rather optimise a process to perfection over six months than ship something useful in six weeks, this won’t be the right fit.