Program Manager - Assistant Manager - Lending Collection

About Us:  Paytm is India's leading mobile payments and financial services distribution company. Pioneer of the mobile QR payments revolution in India, Paytm builds technologies that help small businesses with payments and commerce. Paytm’s mission is to serve half a billion Indians and bring them to the mainstream economy with the help of technology. Role Overview We are looking for a high-ownership Project/Program Manager to lead AI-led transformation initiatives across the Lending Collections ecosystem. This role sits at the intersection of Business, Product, Technology, Data, and AI. The ideal candidate should be equally comfortable understanding a business problem, translating it into a structured product/technology requirement, driving engineering execution, and taking the initiative all the way to production and measurable business impact. This is not a traditional project-management role. We are looking for someone who can own the problem statement, bring structure to ambiguity, drive stakeholders, and turn AI opportunities into production-grade solutions. Key Responsibilities 1. Business Requirement & Problem Discovery Work closely with Business and Collections stakeholders to identify operational pain points, automation opportunities, and AI use cases. Conduct requirement-gathering workshops and translate business needs into clear, actionable requirements. Challenge requirements where necessary and bring structure to ambiguous problem statements. Understand lending collections journeys, customer touchpoints, workflows, operational processes, and relevant business metrics. 2. BRD, Workflow & Solution Documentation Create and maintain detailed BRDs, functional requirements, user stories, process flows, workflows, and solution documentation. Define end-to-end process journeys, including inputs, outputs, decisioning logic, exceptions, dependencies, and integrations. Convert business requirements into granular user stories with clear acceptance criteria. Ensure documentation remains aligned with the evolving product and technology solution. 3. AI & Automation Program Management Identify and evaluate opportunities to leverage Generative AI, Agentic AI, AI automation, LLMs, and intelligent workflows within lending collections. Work with AI/Tech teams to translate business use cases into viable AI solutions. Understand the capabilities and limitations of AI technologies and challenge proposed solutions constructively. Drive AI initiatives from ideation → requirement → solutioning → development → testing → deployment → adoption → measurement. Track business outcomes and ensure AI initiatives deliver measurable improvements in productivity, collections, customer experience, or operational efficiency. 4. Technology & Engineering Collaboration Act as the bridge between Business/Product and Engineering. Clearly communicate the “what” and “why” behind requirements to technology teams. Break complex requirements into executable user stories and development milestones. Work closely with Engineering, Data, AI/ML, QA, and other technology teams to resolve dependencies and blockers. Ensure the technology team has sufficient clarity to execute without repeated requirement ambiguity. Participate actively in solution discussions, technical walkthroughs, testing, UAT, and production readiness. 5. Program Governance & Execution Own project/program trackers and maintain complete visibility on milestones, dependencies, risks, issues, owners, and timelines. Drive regular governance forums and stakeholder reviews. Proactively identify risks and unblock teams rather than waiting for escalations. Manage cross-functional dependencies across Business, Product, Technology, Data, Operations, and external partners. Drive initiatives firmly towards closure, adoption, and business outcomes. 6. Data & Analytics Should be comfortable using SQL to independently fetch, analyse, and validate data required for product and business decisions. Work with Data/Analytics teams to define data requirements and validate outputs. Use data to size opportunities, validate assumptions, monitor performance, and measure the impact of AI initiatives. Ability to translate data insights into actionable product/program decisions. Must-Have Skills Project / Program Management experience, preferably in FinTech, Lending, Banking, Collections, or Financial Services. Strong understanding of lending and collections processes. Excellent requirement-gathering and stakeholder-management skills. Strong capability to create BRDs, FRDs, workflows, process maps, user stories, and acceptance criteria. Proven ability to drive Technology/Engineering teams and manage delivery end-to-end. Hands-on proficiency with JIRA for backlog, sprint, issue, and project management. Working knowledge of Figma for reviewing/contributing to product flows, wireframes, and user journeys. Strong understanding of AI/GenAI/LLMs/Agentic AI and automation use cases. Working proficiency in SQL for data extraction and analysis. Strong analytical and problem-solving ability. Excellent written and verbal communication. High ownership, strong execution bias, and the ability to operate effectively in ambiguity. Good-to-Have Experience working on AI agents, conversational AI, LLM-powered workflows, RAG, AI copilots, or intelligent automation. Experience integrating AI solutions with existing enterprise systems/APIs. Understanding of collections technology platforms, dialers, CRM, payment systems, customer communication platforms, or workflow engines. Exposure to Agile/Scrum methodologies. Experience managing multiple concurrent AI/product initiatives. Familiarity with AI tools such as Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, or equivalent enterprise AI platforms. Experience defining AI success metrics, evaluation frameworks, and operational KPIs. What Success Looks Like Within this role, the candidate should be able to take a statement such as: “Can we use AI to improve this part of the col