Head of Merchant Experience (MX)

The Role

We are looking for a Head of Merchant Experience to build and lead a new Merchant Experience (MX) function within Product.

This is a senior product leadership role responsible for every stage of the merchant journey — from a merchant's first interaction with pawaPay through onboarding, integration, live operations and long-term growth.

Today, many parts of the merchant experience are owned by different teams across the business. Your mission is to bring those experiences together into a single, coherent strategy, roadmap and operating model.

You'll lead a multidisciplinary team spanning product, design, engineering, AI and QA, working closely with Product, Engineering, Marketing, Sales, Operations and Customer Success to make pawaPay the easiest payments platform in Africa to discover, integrate and operate.

As AI increasingly changes how software is built and consumed, you'll also help shape experiences that work equally well for human users and the AI-powered tools and agents that increasingly interact with payment infrastructure.

What You'll Do

Build and lead the Merchant Experience function

• Define the vision, strategy and roadmap for MX as a new product discipline.
• Hire and lead a high-performing team across product, design, engineering and AI.
• Establish the operating rhythms, metrics and accountability structures that make the function run.
• Create a single MX scorecard that gives the business clear, consistent visibility into merchant health.

Own the merchant journey end-to-end

• Take full ownership of the merchant lifecycle: discovery, onboarding, integration, live operations, growth and expansion.
• Drive measurable improvements in activation, adoption, engagement and retention.
• Identify and eliminate friction at every stage of the journey.
• Partner closely with Marketing, Sales and Operations so that no merchant falls through the cracks.

Build product experiences merchants actually love

• Lead the evolution of the merchant dashboard, onboarding flows, documentation and support experience.
• Champion quality, usability and design that respects the merchant's time and intelligence.
• Push self-serve as a first principle — without sacrificing the quality of support when it's needed.
• Partner with Engineering to raise the bar on developer experience, APIs and integration workflows.

Use AI where it genuinely matters

• Identify high-leverage opportunities to apply AI across onboarding, support, analytics and merchant productivity.
• Help define what world-class AI-enabled merchant experiences look like in the payments context.
• Ensure AI-powered experiences are trustworthy, measurable and built for the regulatory environments we operate in.
• Think ahead: how will agent-driven interactions with payment infrastructure reshape the merchant relationship?

Deliver outcomes the business can measure

• Reduce time-to-value for new merchants.
• Improve onboarding completion and activation rates.
• Drive deeper product adoption across the merchant base.
• Reduce support volume and cost-to-serve.
• Build the kind of merchant satisfaction that turns into retention and advocacy.

What We're Looking For

Required

• 10+ years across Product, Customer Experience, Platform or Digital Product leadership.
• 4+ years leading multidisciplinary teams.
• A proven track record of improving customer or user experiences at real scale.
• Experience owning commercial outcomes — activation, retention, conversion, cost-to-serve.
• Strong product and technology fluency; you can go deep with engineering when it counts.
• Excellent communicator, written and verbal.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and energised by the challenge of building something new.

Nice to Have

• Experience in payments, fintech or developer platforms.
• A background building AI-enabled products or workflows.
• B2B SaaS or infrastructure experience.
• Exposure to African markets or emerging-market technology businesses.
• Experience scaling teams and functions through rapid growth.