Technical Program Manager (Cards and Payments)

Engagement details: • Job Title: Technical Program Manager - Cards and Payments • Client: Global Cards & Payments Firm • End-client: Leading Bank • Employment type: Initial 12-month contract with strong potential for extension • Location: Onsite in Kuwait with travel to customer locations as required. • Experience level: 5-7 years *Preferred: Candidates who currently reside in Kuwait and can regularly work from customer and client office locations in Kuwait. Role Overview: Our client, a Global Cards & Payments firm, is engaged with a leading bank in Kuwait and is seeking to onboard a Technical Program Manager - Cards and Payments who will serve as a trusted technology-delivery partner for financial institutions and other payments participants in Kuwait. The role requires to coordinate with customer-facing product and technology initiatives, translate business needs into actionable delivery requirements, and bring together customer, product, technology, and operational stakeholders to achieve reliable outcomes. This role offers end-to-end ownership of small to mid-sized initiatives, exposure to multiple areas of the payments ecosystem, and the opportunity to build deeper expertise in customer technology management and payment-product delivery. Key Responsibilities: • Lead the end-to-end coordination of small to mid-sized payment-product and technology-delivery initiatives, maintaining clear scope, milestones, dependencies, risks, and decision points. • Translate customer business and technical needs into structured delivery requirements, process maps, implementation actions, and acceptance criteria. • Coordinate customer stakeholders and internal product, technology, operations, implementation, and support teams to deliver integrated solutions that address agreed customer needs. • Investigate and resolve complex product, implementation, and operational enquiries by applying structured problem-solving, engaging the appropriate specialists, and maintaining ownership through closure. • Monitor and communicate project performance against agreed success measures, highlighting delivery risks early and presenting practical recovery actions where required. • Strengthen customer relationships through reliable follow-through, clear communication, candid status reporting, and a consistent focus on customeroutcomes. • Improve delivery quality by documenting repeatable processes, capturing implementation lessons, supporting knowledge transfer, and recommending proportionate improvements to customer-delivery practices. Knowledge and Experience • Experience supporting technology, implementation, customer delivery, or product-delivery initiatives within payments, cards, banking, financial services, fintech, or another regulated technology environment. • Working knowledge of the payments lifecycle, including areas such as card issuing, acquiring, transaction processing, digital payments, payment-product implementation, or customer onboarding. • Experience managing small to mid-sized projects or coordinating clearly defined workstreams within larger programmes. • Ability to translate customer needs into structured requirements, process flows, delivery plans, issue statements, and measurable acceptance criteria. • Familiarity with market-standard project and delivery tools for planning, issue and risk management, documentation, reporting, and collaborative working. • Confidence working with business and technical stakeholders and communicating complextopics in clear, decision-oriented language. • Strong analytical and structured problem-solving capability, including the ability to interpret delivery data and identify emergingrisks or performance gaps. • Ability to establish trusted working relationships across customer and internal teams without relying on formal authority. • A customer-value mindset, with the judgement to balance responsiveness, delivery quality, information security, and operational practicality. • Comfortable taking ownership, making evidence-based recommendations, and progressing agreed actions in a fast-moving environment. • Collaborative working style that encourages candid communication, shared accountability, knowledge transfer, and respectful challenge. • Bachelor’s degree in information technology, computer science, engineering, business, finance, or a related discipline is preferred. • Project-management or service-management certification, such as PMP, PRINCE2, Agile, Scrum, or ITIL, is preferred but not mandatory. • Professional fluency in Arabic is advantageous for customer engagement in Kuwait. Mandatory Requirements • Experience in Customer-facing technology or payment-product delivery • Experience in Project or workstream coordination • Experience in Requirements clarification and process mapping, issue,risk, dependency, and action management. • Experience in Cross-functional stakeholder management and structured analysis and concise delivery reporting.