Payments · APIs · Developer Experience · Applied AI

Platform Product Leader — Agentic AI, Payments, DX & APIs

I launched a PayFac to $50M monthly GMV in six months, unified a $1B+ GMV platform, and shipped a RAG assistant that doubled leads closed. The lesson each time: AI and payments only matter once they're trusted in production.

Dubai & London · Open to relocation or remote across UK, EU & North America

GMV platform scaled at Delivery Hero: $1B+
PayFac launched to $50M GMV in 6 months: $50M
Leads closed with a RAG assistant for sales teams: 2x
payment methods across 10+ markets: 25+
Led a team of 10 PMs, designers & analysts: 10

Hire Me As Your Product Leader See my work

Expertise

Where I work

AI Products

LLM, RAG and agentic AI from prototype to production, with evals, governance and monetization built in.

Fintech & Payments

Payment platforms, PayFac models, merchant onboarding, chargebacks and multi-market compliance (PSD2, PCI-DSS, GDPR).

Developer Experience & APIs

API-first platform strategy, developer portals, SDKs, partner adoption and API monetization.

Platform Architecture

Unifying fragmented systems into scalable, reliable platforms, from a product and P&L lens.

Fig. 01 — Platform Blueprint

Four composable layers

How the systems I lead stack together, from money movement at the bottom of the business to the intelligence on top of it.

L1 · Role

Full-lifecycle money movement, smart orchestration and ledger integrity.

Checkout→Dynamic Route→Acquirer / Local Rail→Double-Entry Ledger→3-Way Reconciliation

Scope

20+ live integrations: Adyen, Stripe, Checkout.com, Razorpay, Airwallex, PayPal
Direct acquiring across AU (Tyro), NZ (Windcave), MY/ID (Maybank), TH (BCS) and UAE (Aani)
Schemes & APMs: Visa, Mastercard, Amex, JCB, UnionPay, GrabPay, Alipay, WeChat Pay, NETS QR, Klarna, Atome
3-way reconciliation: PSP ↔ bank statement ↔ internal ledger

Impact

+2 pp authorisation lift-8% processing cost per tx85% drop in unreconciled items70% faster settlement close

The native client edgeAll platform services, payment sheets and event streams feed into production iOS and Android apps with offline queueing, native Apple / Google Pay and biometric authentication.

Quick scan by pillar

Payments & Money Movement

PayFac, ledgers, 3-way reconciliation, routing, acquiring

$1B+ GMV$50M 0→1 PayFac20+ integrations-30% fraud10+ direct reports

View the case →

Developer & API Platforms

OpenAPI, SDKs, event streams, ecosystem adoption

3x API adoption+40 Developer NPS10+ markets25+ cross-functional team

View the case →

Applied AI & Data

Fraud ML, personalisation, refund digital worker

LLM apps, agents, RAG & MCP in production

-30% fraud+8% AOV+25% dispute recovery

View the case →

Selected Work

Three flagship cases. What I owned. What changed.

Each case separates the company outcome from my part in it.

Surface areas shipped

PayFac Core ($50M GMV)
SoftPOS Tap to Pay
Merchant Order OS
Kiosks / eMenu
CBTL Consumer
42Race
Regulated Pharma Logistics

Payments · 0 → 1

Launching a PayFac Platform from 0 → $50M GMV

Delivery Hero · Regional Payments · 2022–2024

Problem

No in-house acquiring capability, fragmented provider relationships, and margin leakage across a high-volume marketplace.

What I owned

PayFac product strategy, corridor sequencing, idempotent ledger flows, reconciliation-as-a-service, self-serve merchant onboarding — through to the in-person checkout edge, including SoftPOS / Tap to Pay on COTS devices.

Business impact (company)

$50M GMV in six months

Checkout screen offering Google Pay alongside card, iDEAL, SEPA, Klarna, UnionPay and Boleto — Checkout with wallets and local payment methods

Checkout form with saved-details one-click checkout option — Checkout with wallets and local payment methods

Read the full case →

My role

Led the cross-functional build with engineering, design, risk and compliance in one delivery loop. Partnered with legal and regulatory on acquiring setup for the launch corridor, and aligned finance operations and merchant support around reconciliation from day one.

Team & reporting

Led a 25+ cross-functional org (6 PMs, 2 Designers, 2 Analysts, engineering squads). Reported to VP of Product.

Key decisions

Launched in one narrow corridor first to prove unit economics and reliability before scaling.
Treated reconciliation as a first-class service, not a back-office report.
Event-driven payments core with idempotent transaction flows, so retries never double-charge.
Self-serve merchant onboarding tooling instead of manual onboarding at scale.

Company outcome

$50M GMV processed within six months. Improved take-rate control. Partner onboarding reduced from weeks to days.

Lesson

In regulated platforms, trust compounds faster than features. Reliability and reconciliation accuracy are the product.

Developer Platforms · API Ecosystems

Unifying a Developer Platform Across 10+ Markets

Delivery Hero · foodpanda · 2020–2024

Problem

After a series of acquisitions, 10+ markets ran inconsistent APIs and duplicated internal services. Every partner integration was bespoke.

What I owned

API platform strategy: OpenAPI contracts, unified event streams and versioning rules, with the same APIs powering partner integrations and client apps — kiosks, eMenu and real-time merchant POS tablet order management.

Business impact (company)

$1B+ GMV ecosystem unified

TabSquare developer portal home showing API services — API discovery and service catalogue

TabSquare developer portal showing ordering, menu management, and payment API packages — API discovery and service catalogue

Read the full case →

My role

Led platform decisions alongside engineering leadership across markets. Ran API governance and backwards-compatibility as shared standards with internal market teams and external partners, treating both as customers with published adoption metrics.

Team & reporting

Managed 10+ direct reports and coordinated across 10+ markets. Reported to VP of Product.

Key decisions

OpenAPI-first contracts with versioned public interfaces.
Backwards compatibility as a rule, not a courtesy.
Internal teams and external partners treated as customers, measured on adoption, time-to-first-call and integration effort.
SDKs and shared event streams (Kafka, Pub/Sub) instead of per-partner integrations.

Company outcome

Unified a $1B+ GMV ecosystem. 20% conversion uplift. Digital payment adoption up 60% across APAC.

Lesson

Developer experience is a distribution strategy. Every hour removed from integration compounds across the ecosystem.

AI in Production · Personalisation

Taking AI Recommendations from Experiment to Production

TabSquare.AI

Problem

AI existed as isolated experiments with no path to production, no evaluation discipline and no measurable commercial value.

What I owned

Recommendation models productised behind real-time digital ordering interfaces; cost vs latency budgets for model serving; evaluation gates before rollout. Active practice: LLM orchestration, RAG and agentic workflows — prototypes, not production claims.

Business impact (company)

+8% average order value

Read the full case →

My role

Partnered with data science and engineering to move models from experiment to production: set evaluation gates with engineering and commercial stakeholders before rollout, and aligned merchant-facing teams on the launch path.

Team & reporting

Led 5+ engineers and a 20+ cross-functional team (QA, Support, Design). Reported to Head of Product.

Key decisions

Lifecycle first: validate the use case, check data readiness, then productise only the models that passed evaluation on real customer journeys.
Model serving trade-offs made explicitly: capability vs cost vs latency.
Guardrails and acceptance criteria set before rollout, not after.

Decision

Offline-first local SQLite sync, optimistic UI state updates, and idempotent queued requests for Tap to Pay and status transitions.

What changed

Zero duplicate transaction faults, resilient order intake during peak Wi-Fi drops, and real-time auditable compliance.

Related: Case 01 →

Applied AI in production

Shipped in production

Autonomous digital worker for customer refunds & ledger execution
Predictive fraud scoring & automated dispute evidence generation (-30% fraud losses)
Real-time recommendation & personalisation engines (+8% AOV)(Case 03)
GCP streaming data pipelines feeding live ML models
Model Context Protocol (MCP) for secure agent-to-tool orchestration
Deterministic evaluation harnesses for LLM applications
Enterprise RAG & dynamic context window engineering
RAG assistant for sales teams (2x leads closed)
Agentic workflows

I use AI to compress discovery, prototyping and product-engineering feedback loops, while keeping architecture, security, evaluation and product judgement human-led.

Tools I use day to day: Claude, Cursor, Gemini, Lovable, n8n.

Hands-on product leader

I lead platform, payments and AI product teams, and I still build. Open to Head of Product and Principal PM roles.

Let's talk →

Global Journey

Four cities. One systems mindset.

years: 12+
countries: 4
GMV ecosystem: $1B+
PayFac GMV: $50M

0106.93°N · 79.85°E
Colombo
Engineering foundation
Journey start · 2012–2017
Software engineer. Learned how systems, APIs and products actually get built. Developed 5+ mobile apps across B2B and B2C.
0201.35°N · 103.82°E
Singapore
Platform scale
2017–2021
Scaled products and platforms across APAC. Managed 5+ engineers and a 20+ cross-functional team. Built high-volume payments and AI platforms.
0351.51°N · 00.13°W
London
Technical product leadership
2021–2024
Led product strategy across AI, fintech and cloud-native platforms. Managed 10+ direct reports and a 25+ cross-functional org.
0425.20°N · 55.27°E
Dubai
Now
2026

I started by building systems. I learned to scale platforms. I moved into technical product leadership. Now I apply that systems mindset to AI, fintech, payments and global products.

What colleagues say

From people who worked with me on payments, product and platform work.

Payments migration

I have worked with Janahan quite extensively and on one notable project, he was instrumental in ensuring that the transition from one payments provider to another, was timely and smooth. That was an extremely complex task involving a new product, multiple stakeholders, and sensitive and aggressive deadlines. In the first 2 months of the launch itself, the product reached ~$10M in volumes!

Kanika Mittal

VP Fintech & Partner, Travel Payments

Product intuition

What stood out consistently was his sharp product intuition and his ability to craft solutions that were not just functional, but genuinely aligned to market needs. He has a rare ability to listen deeply, to customers, and to the market and translate that into extraordinary product outcomes. He was a true partner in every sense, collaborative, grounded in data, and always thinking a few steps ahead.

Sameer Kaushik

VP Sales, TabSquare AI

Engineering + product

What makes Janahan stand out is his unique combination of technical depth and product vision. With his engineering background, he not only understands what it takes to build stable and scalable products but also brings great ideas that are practical, intuitive, and user-friendly.

Kar How Wong

Regional VP Operations

Where I've worked

Worked at

Integrated With / Partnered With

Let's talk

Hiring a Lead or Head of Product for platforms, payments or applied AI? Pick a time or reach out directly. Available in London and Dubai, or global remote.

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