Technical Program Manager, Customer Experience
Pleo · Lisbon · hybrid
ABOUT PLEO
Messy spend management is tricky business. And tedious processes are a lose-lose situation for all involved, not just finance. At Pleo, we're changing that. We build spend solutions that make managing money seamless, empowering, and surprisingly effective for finance teams and employees alike - with a vision to help all businesses ‘go beyond’.
The word ‘Pleo’ actually means ‘more than you’d expect’, and living by that mantra has been the secret to our success over the last 10 years.
Now, we’re at a pivotal moment in our journey; every move we make has a direct impact on our 40,000+ customers, our business, and our collective success. We need people who take pride in uncovering customer needs, who turn complex problems into simple solutions, challenge the way things are done (respectfully), and always aim high. With great ambitions driving us forward, we can’t say we’ve got this whole thing figured out. And frankly, that’s half the fun! What we can say is that we’re a driven, progressive, and, importantly, a kind bunch of 850+ people from over 100 nationalities, all committed to delivering the future of business spending, together.
ABOUT THE ROLE
We're looking for a Technical Program Manager, Customer Experience at Pleo. In this role, you'll help lead complex technical programs at the intersection of Customer Experience, Customer Success, Support, Onboarding, Product, Engineering, Data, Revenue Operations and AI. You’ll help turn Pleo’s CX transformation strategy into scalable technical capabilities that make it easier for customers to onboard, get support, realise value, resolve issues and grow with Pleo.
This is not a traditional project-management role focused on timelines, meetings and status updates. You’ll understand the customer and business problem, get into the technical details, translate requirements between CX and Engineering, challenge proposed solutions, manage technical dependencies, and drive programs from concept through implementation, adoption and measurable impact.
WHO YOU’LL BE WORKING WITH AND REPORTING TO
You’ll report to our Director, CX and work closely with teams in Customer Success, Support, Onboarding, Digital Content and Self-Service, Voice of the Customer, and Revenue Operations. Our team is highly collaborative and dedicated to acting as a technical bridge between CX and Pleo’s Product, Engineering, Data and systems organisations. You’ll also have the chance to partner with teams across Product, Engineering, Data and Analytics, Finance, Risk and Fraud, and Business Systems to ensure success and keep technical decisions tied to customer outcomes and business value.
WHAT YOU’LL BE DOING
As a Technical Program Manager, you will:
- Lead CX technology programs end-to-end, from problem definition and requirements through design, testing, launch, adoption and optimisation. Own scope, milestones, dependencies, risks and decisions, and confirm after launch that the technology changed adoption, customer impact and operations.
- Partner with CX leadership to define the technical roadmap for the customer experience transformation, and help establish the future-state CX technology architecture for Pleo’s next stage of growth.
- Translate customer and business problems into clear technical requirements and acceptance criteria for Product, Engineering, Data and systems teams, and explain architecture, trade-offs, risks and options to CX leaders in business language.
- Drive integration programs connecting CRM, Customer Success, Support, Onboarding, Product, billing, analytics and AI platforms. Document customer data flows: where data originates, where it moves, which system owns it and how it is used.
- Support a single customer view and improve customer health and risk infrastructure, combining usage, support, onboarding, payment, engagement and sentiment signals. Partner with Data on churn prediction, proactive risk detection and next-best-action.
- Drive AI-enabled CX programs for self-service, agent productivity, onboarding, Customer Success, knowledge retrieval, QA and virtual customer-facing capabilities. Set scope, release criteria and quality gates for the engineers and data scientists building AI agents, without line management of those teams.
- Automate repetitive CX workflows and reduce technical debt across customer-facing systems. Challenge automation that is covering up a broken process.
- Lead technical programs with Support (routing, case management, escalations), Customer Success (health, lifecycle triggers, forecasting) and Onboarding (digital journeys, implementation tracking, time-to-value).
- Own UAT coordination, business readiness and technical program governance for major CX releases, including decision logs, dependency and risk tracking, and architecture decisions. Escalate risks with recommendations, not just status.
- Make sure CX signals reach Product, so recurring friction and customer needs become visible and actionable.
WHAT YOU BRING
You’ll thrive in this role if you have:
- 5+ years of Technical Program Management, leading complex technology programs.
- Experience in SaaS, fintech, enterprise technology or another high-growth digital environment.
- Experience managing programs across multiple systems, integrations, APIs, data flows and technical dependencies, where no single team owns the whole solution.
- A solid grasp of the software development lifecycle, from requirements and architecture through testing, release and optimisation, in Agile or hybrid environments.
- Program fundamentals: requirements, scope, roadmap, dependency and risk management, technical governance, stakeholder management, UAT, release and change management, and adoption measurement.
- Strong analytical skills and comfort with operational and customer data.
- Clear written and verbal communication. You can state the problem, recommendation, trade-offs and decision needed concisely, and translate technical decisions into language senior stakeholders understand.
- Influence without direct authority, and the confidence to challenge both business and technical assumptions.
- The ability to run several high-priority programs at once, while keeping the broader CX strategy in view.
- Hands-on experience taking AI-enabled features into production and owning their quality after launch, including accuracy, resolution rates, and knowing when a human should take over.
- A track record of moving complex programs from idea to measurable results.
Nice to have:
- Direct Customer Experience or Revenue Operations experience
- Gainsight or similar CS platforms, Zendesk or similar support platforms, Salesforce or another enterprise CRM
- Building customer health or churn-prediction models, or working with product usage and behavioural data
- Administering conversational AI platforms, designing virtual agents, or building agentic workflows
- Automated QA or knowledge-management platforms
- Payments, spend-management or financial-data experience
- SQL or data-querying skills
- Managing global or multi-market customer platforms
WHY IS THIS ROLE A GOOD FIT FOR YOU
This role is a good fit for you if:
- You enjoy solving complex customer problems through technology and can move between CX leaders and Engineering teams.
- You believe technology should improve outcomes rather than just automate processes.
- You want ownership of hard problems rather than coordination work, and you’re comfortable creating structure in ambiguity.
- You want to be a trusted technical partner to CX leadership, Product and Engineering, helping build a connected, AI-enabled CX operating model.
This role is not a good fit for you if:
- You are looking for a traditional project-management role focused on timelines, meetings and status updates.
- You prefer to avoid getting into the technical details, data models, failure scenarios, and build-versus-buy trade-offs.
- You are unco