About Umba
Umba is a pan-African digital bank operating in Kenya and Nigeria, on a mission to make financial services more accessible, affordable, and empowering for millions of people across Africa. Since acquiring a licensed microfinance bank in Kenya in 2023, we have grown revenue more than sixfold. We build and run financial technology products for individuals and SMEs, spanning credit, savings and deposits, payments and foreign exchange, with new lines in development.
Job Summary
We are hiring a Senior Product Manager to own product strategy and execution for financial technology products end to end: discovery, spec, delivery, launch, and the metric that follows. You will work across the product lines we operate today and the ones we stand up next, and you will partner with senior leadership on where the next bet goes.
This is not a traditional product role. We operate in an AI-native environment. The team uses Claude Code, Claude Design, Codex, and similar tools to spec, prototype, and ship. The Senior PM is expected to write product and technical specifications that AI agents can execute against, drive delivery end to end, ship small PRs directly when it is faster than handing off, coordinate the stakeholders that turn a product into a business, and own the outcomes those products generate. The bar is moving 10x faster without sacrificing quality.
Responsibilities
The role spans two domains.
Strategy and Discovery
- Own the roadmap across your product lines, which may include credit and lending, savings and deposits, payments and foreign exchange, and new products in development.
- Run customer discovery directly with target segments, from individual borrowers and savers to SMEs, business operators, and freelancers.
- Size opportunities, instrument funnels, and validate hypotheses against production data. You do not wait for an analyst.
- Make prioritisation calls across very different product lines (a credit policy tweak vs. a new payments corridor vs. a deposit campaign) and defend them with numbers.
- Track competitor moves in the markets you operate in and translate them into product decisions.
Execution and Delivery
- Write product and technical specifications that engineers and AI coding agents can implement directly. Tight, unambiguous, testable.
- Prototype in Claude Design to validate concepts before committing engineering time.
- Code and ship small PRs yourself with Claude Code when it is faster than handing off. PMs here live in the codebase.
- Drive delivery end to end. Own scope, timeline, and quality.
- Run delivery in Linear, our product and project management surface.
- Run the cadence with Engineering: standups, sprint reviews, unblocking, bug triage, and trade-off calls when things slip.
- Coordinate across stakeholders: leadership, Engineering, Data, Credit, Operations, Risk, Compliance, and Marketing.
- Align scope, ship dates, and trade-offs across teams that have different incentives.
- Own outcomes, not output. Tie every initiative to a revenue, growth, or risk metric. Track it post-launch and iterate until the metric moves.
- Review AI-generated implementations, prototypes, and analyses for correctness, edge cases, and business fit.
- Build feedback loops: customer signal, spec, AI-assisted build, metric, next spec. Compress the cycle.
- Own launch comms and internal enablement.
Qualifications and Experience
- 5+ years in product management.
- Direct experience shipping consumer or SME products in fintech, banking, lending, or payments.
- Track record of owning outcomes. You measure yourself by the metric that moved (revenue, active users, default rate, deposit growth), not by what was planned or shipped.
- Strong stakeholder coordination. You drive alignment across the cross-functional set above without losing your own thread.
- Strong written communication. You can write a spec a senior engineer does not need to ask questions about.
- Comfortable reading production data yourself. SQL fluency, or willing to get there in week one.
- Demonstrated proficiency with AI tools in your daily workflow (Claude Code, Claude Design, Codex, and similar). You have shipped real work with them, not just experimented.
- Comfortable reading and writing code, enough to ship a small PR with Claude Code.
- High agency. You move from problem to validated solution to shipped product without waiting to be told.
- Able to read financial regulatory guidance in the markets you operate in and translate it into product requirements.
Highly Preferred
- Experience with credit products (origination, scoring, collections) and deposit products (rate strategy, treasury, funding).
- Exposure to foreign exchange, cross-border payments, stablecoins, or virtual account infrastructure.
- Experience working with engineering teams that use AI coding agents in production workflows.
- Prior work in emerging markets, particularly Africa, SEA, or LATAM fintech.
Bonus
- Founder or 0 to 1 product experience.
- Familiarity with trade finance instruments (invoice factoring, LPO financing, purchase order financing).
Application Requirements
- Salary expectations in Kenyan Shillings.
- A short note on something you built end to end using AI: what it was, how you used AI to build it, what shipped.
- Valid work authorisation for Kenya.
Method of Application
Umba is an equal opportunity employer and encourages applications from all qualified individuals.
Due to the urgency, interviews will be on a rolling basis.
