Fintech & Payments
PayFac strategy, idempotent payment flows, ledgers and reconciliation. My ownership connected acquiring decisions with merchant onboarding and finance operations.
Read the deep diveJanahan Thavendran · Hiring
Head of Product Dubai
Janahan Thavendran · Platform Product Leader available for Head of Product roles in Dubai, spanning payments infrastructure, developer platforms and applied AI.
Product leadership
Engineering foundations. Commercial product decisions.
Hiring a Head of Product in Dubai means finding someone who can connect commercial priorities with the systems needed to deliver them. I bring a former full-stack engineer’s perspective and 12+ years across product and engineering, including Delivery Hero and TabSquare.AI. My focus is the shared foundations other products run on: money movement, APIs, developer experience and AI applications.
The work
Product direction, platform decisions and team leadership
- Set product priorities around growth, integration effort, payment reliability and operating cost rather than a feature list.
- Make product and architecture trade-offs alongside engineering, with explicit decisions on sequencing, compatibility and rollout.
- Bring engineering, design, risk, compliance and finance operations into a shared delivery loop for regulated payments.
- Treat internal product teams and external partners as platform customers, with adoption and time to go-live as meaningful measures.
At Delivery Hero, I managed 10+ direct reports and led a 25+ cross-functional organisation, reporting to the VP of Product. My ownership included PayFac product strategy, corridor sequencing, API governance and merchant onboarding. At TabSquare.AI, I led 5+ engineers within a 20+ cross-functional team, reporting to the Head of Product, and partnered with data science and commercial stakeholders on AI recommendations.
Company outcomes
Evidence from the platforms I worked on
These are company and platform outcomes, not individual achievements. The work and expertise pages explain my product ownership and the teams involved.
$50M
PayFac GMV in six months
3x
API adoption
+8%
Average order value from recommendations
Four areas of expertise
Explore the relevant product work
DX & APIs
OpenAPI contracts, versioning, developer portals and partner onboarding. Developer experience is part of the platform’s distribution strategy.
Read the deep diveApplied AI
Recommendations, fraud ML and AI agent workflows, with evaluation gates, tool permissions, and cost and latency budgets.
Read the deep diveArchitecture & Platform Product Management
The product decisions behind shared systems: the problem, the chosen approach, the trade-off and what changed.
Read the deep diveAvailability
Let’s discuss your product mandate
Based in Dubai & London, open to relocation or remote across the UK, EU and North America. My priority is a full-time Head of Product or Lead Product role. Selective advisory work is handled separately through Prodaptix. If you are hiring in Dubai or the UAE, I’m happy to discuss the mandate, team and platform challenges. My CV is available on request.
Discuss a Head of Product roleAlso exploring: Senior Product Manager London