Product Certification Manager

NMI is a leading provider of payment gateway solutions, specialising in card-present solutions and payment processing. We are seeking a Product Certification Manager to join our Payments Gateway group in the UK. This role sits alongside our Protocols team, which owns the services that manage connectivity between the NMI platform and external card acquirers and payment processors. Certifying those connections is what turns engineering work into live, revenue-generating processor integrations, and it is one of the most common places where delivery timelines slip.

As Product Certification Manager, you will own the gateway-to-processor certification pipeline end to end. You will track every open certification across our processor portfolio, maintain a clear and current view of where each one stands, and drive each to completion as quickly as the external party will allow. You will be the person who knows, at any moment, what is blocking go-live and who needs to move for it to clear.

Key responsibilities:

• Maintain a single source of truth for all in-flight and upcoming certifications across processors and acquirers, including status, owner, target dates, and outstanding test cases. You will keep this visible to engineering, product, and enterprise sales so certification timing feeds directly into deal and delivery planning.
• Own the relationships with processor and acquirer certification teams. You will be the primary point of contact, manage the cadence of communication, and build the kind of working rapport that gets NMI prioritised when queues are long.
• Negotiate test scope. Certification suites are often larger than a given integration warrants. You will work with processors to scope test cases down to what is genuinely required, challenge redundant or non-applicable cases, and reduce the certification burden without compromising correctness or compliance.
• Escalate and clear third party blockers. When a certification stalls on the processor side, you will drive it forward: chasing responses, escalating through the right channels, and removing dependencies before they become schedule risk. You will treat external delay as something to be actively managed rather than passively absorbed.
• Partner closely with the Protocols engineering team to sequence certification work against development, surface issues early, and make sure test failures get triaged and resolved quickly.

The ideal candidate has strong experience managing external technical relationships in payments or a comparable regulated, integration-heavy environment. You understand how gateways, acquirers, and processors fit together, and you are comfortable reading certification specifications and reasoning about test cases well enough to negotiate them credibly. You are organised, persistent, and diplomatically relentless, equally at ease coordinating internal engineering teams and pushing an external partner to move faster. You operate with sound judgement in high-stakes environments where reliability, security, and compliance are paramount.

What You’ll Be Doing:

• Own the gateway-to-processor certification pipeline end to end, maintaining a single, current source of truth for every open and upcoming certification across processors and acquirers, including status, owner, target dates, and outstanding test cases.
• Take ownership of processor and acquirer certification relationships, acting as the primary point of contact and building the working rapport that gets NMI prioritised when certification queues are long.
• Negotiate test scope with processors, scoping certification suites down to what is genuinely required, challenging redundant or non-applicable cases, and reducing certification burden without compromising correctness or compliance.
• Proactively identify certification blockers and schedule risk, driving each open certification to completion as quickly as the external party will allow.
• Escalate and clear third party blockers, chasing responses, escalating through the right channels, and removing dependencies before they become delivery risk.
• Clearly articulate certification status, timelines, and trade-offs to engineering, Product, and enterprise sales stakeholders, so certification timing feeds directly into deal and delivery planning.
• Partner closely with the Protocols engineering team to sequence certification against development, surface issues early, and ensure test failures are triaged and resolved quickly.
• Drive improvements in how certification is tracked, forecast, and reported, raising the visibility and predictability of the pipeline over time.
• Ensure certification work adheres to the relevant card network rules and compliance standards (e.g., PCI, card scheme mandates) throughout.
• Contribute to preventative improvements, capturing lessons from stalled or delayed certifications and feeding them back into how the team plans future work.

Skills and experience:

• Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Minimum of 5 years of experience managing technical projects or external partner relationships in a commercial environment, ideally in payments or a comparable regulated, integration-heavy domain.
• Strong understanding of how payment gateways, acquirers, and processors fit together, and of the certification process that connects them.
• Ability to read and reason about certification specifications and test cases well enough to negotiate scope credibly with processor teams.
• Familiarity with major processors and acquirers (e.g., TSYS, Fiserv, Worldpay, Barclaycard, Elavon) strongly preferred.
• Knowledge of card network rules and payment compliance standards (e.g., PCI, Visa, Mastercard, and Amex mandates) preferred.
• Proven ability to manage multiple concurrent workstreams and keep a complex pipeline organised, current, and visible to stakeholders.
• Proven ability to manage external relationships and escalate effectively, pushing partners to move faster while preserving the relationship.
• Strong problem-solving skills, with the ability to anticipate blockers and proactively address them before they affect timelines.
• Excellent communication skills, capable of explaining certification status and trade-offs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Comfortable operating in high-stakes environments where reliability, security, and compliance are paramount.

As well as being a part of something exciting everyday, you will also receive the following benefits:

• Annual bonus scheme dependent on individual and company performance
• Annual salary of £40,000 - £50,000
• 25 days holiday each year (+ bank holidays + 1 day after each year of service with up to a max. of 30 days)
• Workplace pension scheme
• Private medical insurance (upon 30 days of employment)
• 7 hours per day, 35 hours per week
• A remote first culture
• Great work-life balance with our Flexi-time policy
• Family Friendly policies (Enhanced Maternity and Paternity Pay and Shared Parental Leave).
• A chance to develop with an allocated company training budget
• Bike2Work Scheme
• Lifeworks, an Employee Assistance Programme which offers wellbeing, family and financial support services, such as assessments, resources and even 1:1 counselling sessions. It also offers interesting perks such as discounts on gyms, restaurants, high street retailers and cinema tickets
• A strong commitment to employee wellbeing including mental health first aiders
• Employee referral scheme with generous financial reward
• Bonusly colleague reward scheme