Product Manager / Delivery Lead

Melio is seeking a passionate Senior Product Manager / Delivery Lead to join our expanding team:

  • Level: Senior
  • Position: Full time
  • Salary: Based on experience
  • Location: South Africa (Remote)

Melio AI is an AI product and consulting company, recognised as an AWS Advanced Tier Partner specialising in AI/ML. We drive real-world AI adoption for businesses across multiple industries. We don’t just build models - we deliver production-ready AI solutions that work at scale. From AI Agents and LLM-powered applications to high-performance MLOps, we develop AI systems that deliver tangible business value.

We’re looking for a Senior Product Manager / Delivery Lead to run point on our client programmes and internal product development. This isn’t a traditional PM role: every programme is AI-native, with data scientists, ML/GenAI engineers, and DevSecOps engineers as core delivery team members. You’ll own delivery and help shape the product roadmap — for enterprise programmes (document intelligence, agentic systems, fraud/risk models, and similar) and for how Melio builds and ships products internally — while going deep enough technically to bridge business requirements into something engineers and data scientists can act on.

What you will be working on

  • Programme Delivery – Own cadence, RAID, escalation, and executive reporting across multi-workstream AI programmes at enterprise clients.
  • Product & Delivery Roadmaps – Build and maintain product roadmaps with stakeholders, and define the delivery roadmap that turns priorities into sequenced, executable work.
  • Bridging Business and Technical Teams – Translate business requirements into something data scientists and ML engineers can act on directly, and translate technical trade-offs back into business language.
  • AI Product Delivery Practices – Get hands-on with the practices specific to AI-native delivery: groundtruth and evaluation design, human-in-the-loop workflow design, and communicating model performance and limitations honestly to non-technical stakeholders.
  • Team Sustainability – Protect delivery-team capacity and wellbeing while managing client expectations on scope and milestones, especially under pressure.
  • Stakeholder and Executive Communication – Draft and deliver executive updates that request clear decisions and support, not just statuses.
  • Cross-Functional Collaboration – Work daily alongside ML engineers, data scientists, and DevSecOps engineers as core members of your delivery team.

What we are looking for

  • Comfortable in AI-native delivery – You’re willing to upskill on the AI industry’s latest delivery practices and are confident working directly with data scientists, ML engineers, and DevSecOps engineers as core team members.
  • A technical bar above the typical PM – You use AI tools day-to-day as part of how you work, not just to manage projects that involve AI, and you’re comfortable getting close enough to technical detail to bridge into requirements gathering for data scientists and engineers.
  • Autonomous & Ownership-Driven – You take initiative, own outcomes, and are comfortable being the person who surfaces risks before they become problems rather than after.
  • Calm Under Pressure – You can hold client expectations, team capacity, and delivery quality in tension without letting any one of them silently give way.
  • Collaborative Yet Independent – You can drive a programme independently but work closely with technical specialists to know where to lean on them versus where to build your own fluency.

What we are NOT looking for

  • Not a Jira pusher – Tools support delivery; they are not the job.
  • Not a meeting scheduler – Coordination is table stakes. What matters is unblocking decisions and driving execution.
  • Not a role that AI can replace – AI tools help. What we need is your judgement under ambiguity, competing pressures, and incomplete information.

Qualification & Experience

Requirements

  • 5+ years in project/programme/delivery management, ideally in technology consulting or enterprise software delivery.
  • Experience running multi-workstream programmes for enterprise clients (financial services a strong plus).
  • Strong stakeholder and executive communication, including escalations and executive updates.
  • Familiarity with Agile/Scrum delivery practices.

Alternative backgrounds that are a strong fit

  • Software engineer or AI/ML engineer with a strong delivery affinity — you have shipped with teams and care as much about getting work over the line as building it.
  • Product manager who has owned both roadmap and delivery outcomes — not discovery alone.
  • Feature / business analyst with strong delivery ownership — you don’t stop at requirements; you’ve driven work through to shipped outcomes.
  • UX designer who has led cross-functional delivery and is ready to own programme outcomes end-to-end.

Nice to Have

  • Prior experience delivering AI/ML or AI-native products (not just software that happens to use AI).
  • Exposure to human-in-the-loop design, model evaluation/groundtruth, or MLOps.
  • Startup or fast-moving consulting experience where practices are still being defined.
  • AWS foundational certificates.

What you will learn and grow into

  • AI-Native Delivery Practices – Learn and help shape the latest industry practices for delivering AI products, not just software projects.
  • Technical Fluency – Grow more technical than a typical PM, to the point where you can meaningfully participate in requirements gathering with data scientists and engineers — and, if it’s a direction you want to grow into, get hands-on with delivery work yourself.
  • Enterprise AI Delivery – Gain experience running real-world AI programmes for top companies in regulated industries.
  • End-to-End Programme Ownership – Move from status reporting to genuine delivery leadership: roadmaps, risk, capacity, and executive decisions.

Why Join Us?

  • Work with one of South Africa’s leading AI startups, on programmes that are genuinely AI-native rather than software-with-AI-attached.
  • Join a small, fast-moving team where the practices themselves are still evolving — help shape what “best practice” AI delivery looks like as you go.
  • Take full ownership of your programmes and grow into a more technical, more senior delivery leader than a traditional PM path offers.

Contact Us

If you are interested in this position please email Merelda (merelda@melio.ai) with the below information:

  • CV
  • Expected Salary
  • Notice period