Permanent - Senior Project Manager — Africa - Johannesburg (Incl. Northern Suburbs) - South Africa

• Senior Project Manager to lead and deliver a portfolio of customer support and services programmes across  African markets.
• This is a high-impact, high-visibility role that combines classical programme management with the operational rigour required to run a multi-country support function — escalation management, knowledge-based build-out, ticket triage standards, contact-centre workflow design, vendor and BPO oversight, and continuous improvement of the customer experience.
• The single point of accountability for delivery: setting the plan, driving cross-functional execution, surfacing risk early, and making sure customers and internal stakeholders feel the difference.
• Will report directly to the Senior Manager, and partner closely with Product, Engineering, Customer Success, Legal, and in-country operational leads. This is a demanding role. Africa is a complex operating environment; multiple regulators, languages, currencies, time zones, and infrastructure realities.

Key responsibilities

Programme delivery 

• Own end-to-end delivery of customer support and services programmes across the African region, from intake through launch, hyper care, and steady-state handover. 
• Build and maintain integrated plans covering scope, schedule, resourcing, dependencies, risks, and budget. 
• Drive weekly governance: status reporting, steering committees, executive updates, and decision logs.

Customer Support & Operations Focus

• Design and improve support workflows: ticket triage and prioritization, escalation paths, SLA frameworks, and knowledge-based coverage for the African region. 
• Stand up and govern in-region BPO and vendor relationships, including SOWs, scorecards, QBRs, and remediation when targets slip. 
• Partner with Product and Manufacturing to package customer-impacting issues into structured escalations with full context, reproduction steps, business impact, and proposed remedies. 
• Lead post-incident reviews and translate findings into knowledge-based articles, playbooks, and process changes.

Stakeholder Management

• Be the trusted operating partner to the Senior Manager, proactive, organized, candid about risk, and relentless on follow-through. 
• Translate between executive, technical, and front-line audiences without losing fidelity. 
• Manage upward, downward, and laterally across markets that operate in different languages, cultures, and regulatory regimes.

Continuous Improvement

• Establish KPIs and operating cadences that make performance visible and improvement measurable (CSAT, FRT, resolution rate, deflection, backlog age). 
• Identify automation, self-service, and tooling opportunities; build the business case; deliver them.

Experience (required)

• 8–12 years of progressive project / programme management experience, with at least 4 years delivering in customer support, contact-centre, or operations environments. 
• Demonstrated track record managing complex, multi-country programmes across two or more African markets (e.g. South Africa, Guinea, Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt, Morocco, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire and Mongolia). 
• Experience leading through ambiguity, competing priorities, and tight timelines without losing structure or composure.

Qualifications 

• Bachelor’s Degree in Business, Operations or a related field.
• PMP, PRINCE2, or equivalent programme management certification.

Skills & Capabilities

• Excellent written and verbal communication in English.
• French language proficiency is highly advantageous, given the role’s coverage of Francophone African markets.
• Strong commercial acumen and comfort with budgets, vendor contracts, and business cases.
• Confident with tooling: Jira, Confluence, Asana or equivalent; ticketing platforms (Zendesk, Intercom, Salesforce Service Cloud); BI tooling (Looker, Tableau, Power BI).
• Cultural fluency across African markets and the ability to operate with humility and curiosity in unfamiliar contexts.