Director PMO Full Time NEW

Location: Dubai, UAE

Reports to: Chief Operations Officer

About The Role

The role will lead the end-to-end execution of strategic projects, programmes and product delivery across the company’s credit-lending platform and its market deployments. Responsible for ensuring that complex, cross-functional initiatives are planned and executed with precision, the role works closely with technology, operations, compliance, product, credit risk and partner integrations.

The Director will serve as the central point of accountability for roadmap delivery, operational readiness, and the continuous improvement of delivery practices across the business. This is a senior leadership position that requires deep experience in digital lending or financial services delivery, strong technology and operational fluency, and the ability to drive alignment across multiple stakeholders in a fast-growing, regulated environment.

The ideal candidate will demonstrate expertise in managing and coordinating cross-functional teams, developing comprehensive project plans, allocating resources efficiently, overseeing budgets, and excelling in risk management. He/she must have the skills to effectively manage multiple projects (initiatives, change requests) along with their dependencies and stakeholder engagements. Additionally, the candidate should possess strong analytical skills and the ability to compile and analyze projects (be familiar with Jira, Confluence, MS-project, MS-office).

Key Responsibilities

Strategic Delivery & Programme Leadership:

• Own the delivery of the enterprise roadmap, ensuring alignment with the COO, Commercial and Technology teams.
• Lead planning, execution and delivery of new projects and major programmes such as new product launches, regulatory changes, platform enhancements, change requests and market expansions.
• Oversee projects across cross-functional technical and business streams for end-to-end delivery, fostering a collaborative work environment, ensuring effective communication and synergy among team members.
• Ensure programmes are fully scoped, resourced, risk-assessed, and tracked through to completion.
• Provide clear status reporting, dependency management, and decision frameworks to senior leadership.
• Own the prioritisation forum, process and governance alongside resource planning and allocation.
• Customize, utilize and maintain Jira to create dynamic project dashboards, providing real-time visibility into project status, progress, and key metrics that meet project and stakeholder requirements, incorporating analytical insights.

Project & Portfolio Management

• Develop a structured delivery framework (Agile/Hybrid/Waterfall) suitable for the company’s product and regulatory environment.
• Manage the project portfolio, prioritising initiatives based on strategic value, risk, resource availability, and ROI.
• Ensure robust project governance, documentation, and control processes are in place.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Work closely with Product, Engineering, Operations, Risk, Data, Compliance, and Commercial teams to coordinate programme execution.
• Facilitate cross-departmental alignment on requirements, timelines, decision points, and resource planning.
• Act as a key escalation point for conflicting priorities, blockers, or delivery risks.

Operational Readiness & Quality Assurance

• Ensure that new features, products, and system changes are ready for operational deployment, with adequate testing, training, risk assessment, and support structures.
• Oversee UAT, release management, and change control processes.
• Drive continuous improvement in delivery workflows, quality assurance, and operational efficiency.

Risk, Compliance & Regulatory Alignment

• Ensure delivery processes incorporate relevant regulatory and compliance requirements (e.g., FCA, consumer credit, data protection, lending rules).
• Maintain strong risk identification, mitigation, and reporting across all delivery initiatives.
• Collaborate with Risk, Banking partners and Compliance teams to ensure regulatory changes are implemented correctly and on time.

Leadership & Team Management

• Lead and mentor a high-performing team of project managers, functional / delivery leads and PMO staff.
• Build capability within the team through coaching, training, and structured development frameworks.
• Foster a culture of accountability, transparency, and excellence in execution.

Qualifications And Experience

• Bachelors in Business / Computer science / Engineering / MBA (or equivalent)
• 10+ years’ experience in project, programme, or delivery leadership roles.
• Proven experience in financial services, lending, fintech, or credit-platform environments.
• Strong understanding of the full lending lifecycle (originations, underwriting, credit decisioning, servicing, collections).
• Demonstrated success delivering complex, cross-functional technology programmes.
• Deep knowledge of project management methodologies and tools (Agile, Scrum, Kanban, Waterfall, Lean).
• Exceptional stakeholder management skills, including at C-suite and board level.
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, and critical-thinking capability.
• Excellent communication, influencing, and negotiation skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working in a highly regulated environment.
• Previous responsibility for PMO leadership, Programme Management or portfolio/project governance.
• Experience with SaaS lending platforms, decision engines, or orchestration tools.
• Certifications such as Prince2, PMP, Agile PM, Scrum Master, or equivalent.
• Exposure to data-driven decisioning, machine learning credit models, or digital onboarding journeys.

The Ideal Candidate Is Someone Who

• Thinks strategically with strong operational discipline.
• Is highly organised with the ability to manage multiple concurrent programmes.
• Leads with presence with the ability to drive clarity in ambiguous environments.
• Has a delivery-focused mindset with a passion for continuous improvement.
• Inspires through collaboration, adopting pragmatic and solutions-oriented ideas.
• Has high integrity and sound judgement in a regulated context.

Company Overview

Ezra provides B2B digital lending solutions for emerging markets in partnership with mobile and digital wallet operators and financial service providers. Ezra supports 24 operations in 23 countries, across Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Our key office locations are in Nairobi, Kenya and Dubai, UAE.

Our flagship products are Airtime Credit Services (ACS), Nano and BNPL.

• ACS is an airtime or data advance offered to prepaid mobile subscribers at the point of low credit.
• Nano is a micro cash advance offered to mobile wallet users on demand.
• BNPL facilitates payment installments for products and services

As a FinTech company, our business is entirely technology and data driven, from determining subscriber eligibility, generating relevant offers, managing risk, loan issuance, recovery, optimizing performance and reporting, reconciliation and billing.

Each day we process approximately 21M loan requests and 1.4 TB of data across our markets. This process needs to be robust, reliable and secure.

But it doesn’t end there. We’re exploring new ways of using our platform and transactional data to improve our products and develop new product opportunities.