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. Show more Show less