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JD — Platform Owner

Owner Classification Review Date Status
People Operations Internal April 2027 Active

Job Description: Platform Owner

Department: Technology & Digital — Platform Engineering
Reports to: Head of Engineering / CDO

Role Overview

Simpaisa's Platform Team provides the shared infrastructure that every product squad depends on — payment gateway core, API gateway, identity and authentication, operator integration framework, notification services, and the internal developer platform. These are not features. They are foundations. When they break or lag behind, every squad feels it.

The Platform Owner is the product manager for the platform. You own the platform roadmap, manage the platform backlog, and work with the Platform Engineering team to ensure the shared services that squads depend on are reliable, well-documented, and continuously improving. You are not a Technical Architect — that role designs how the platform is built. You are the person who decides what gets built, when, and why, based on squad needs, reliability data, and the engineering strategy.

Key Responsibilities

  • Own and maintain the platform roadmap — what shared capabilities are being built, improved, or deprecated, and in what order.

  • Manage the platform backlog: prioritise features and improvements based on squad demand, reliability data, security requirements, and CDO strategy.

  • Work with Product Managers across squads to understand platform dependencies — what squads need from the platform that they don't yet have, and what is blocking them.

  • Define and publish platform SLAs: availability, latency, incident response times, and deprecation timelines. Squads depend on these to plan their own delivery.

  • Monitor platform performance against SLAs; work with the Platform Engineering team to address degradation before it becomes a squad-level incident.

  • Maintain the service catalogue — what the platform provides, how to use it, what the SLAs are, and how to request new capabilities.

  • Manage the platform's relationship with security and compliance — DFSA and SBP requirements often have platform implications (data residency, encryption, audit logging).

  • Govern platform versioning and deprecation — squads need enough notice to migrate off deprecated APIs or services.

  • Communicate platform changes clearly: release notes, migration guides, breaking change warnings.

Required Skills and Experience

  • Platform product management: Experience owning a shared technical platform or internal developer product. Understanding of how platform decisions affect downstream product teams.

  • Technical fluency: Not a developer role, but requires enough technical depth to work credibly with engineers, understand architectural tradeoffs, and write meaningful acceptance criteria for platform capabilities.

  • Payments domain: Understanding of payment infrastructure — API gateway patterns for operator integrations, idempotency, webhook reliability, settlement data flows. This is not optional at Simpaisa.

  • SLA management: Experience defining and tracking service level agreements for shared services. Ability to translate reliability data into product decisions.

  • Stakeholder management: Comfortable saying no to squads when platform capacity is constrained, and managing the conversation constructively.

  • Jira / Confluence: Experience managing complex backlogs and maintaining platform documentation.

  • Agile: Experience working within a squad model as a product owner for platform or infrastructure capabilities.

General Requirements

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related field.

  • 8+ years of experience in product or platform management within technology organisations.

  • Demonstrated track record of managing and improving shared technology platforms.

What We Offer

  • Competitive salary benchmarked to your local market.

  • A platform that genuinely matters — every squad's delivery velocity depends on it.

  • Clear mandate: the Platform Team Charter is published; the platform backlog is yours to own.

  • Direct working relationship with CDO and Head of Engineering.

  • Flexible hybrid working.