NALA
Strategy & Operations Manager
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👋 About Us
NALA is building Payments for the Next Billion. Faster, smarter, and fairer transfers for everyone. Since 2022, we've grown our business 120x, grown the team from 9 to 150+, raised $50M+ from top-tier investors, and were named to the Forbes Fintech 50 in 2025.
We operate two core products:
- NALA, our consumer app making cross-border payments cheaper, faster and more reliable for the global diaspora. Allowing users to send money from the UK, US and EU to Africa and Asia.
- Rafiki, our B2B payments infrastructure, is powering global payments.
Our team includes alumni from Wise, Stripe, Monzo, Revolut, and CashApp — operators who’ve scaled world-class products. We act with urgency, think deeply, and put our customers first always.
At NALA, this isn’t just a job. It’s ownership, impact, and the chance to change global payments forever.
Join us in building Payments for the Next Billion
🙌 Your Mission
Global Ops is where NALA's ambitions meet reality. Every new market we open, every licence we win, every account we go live with — someone has to actually land it, across a dozen teams, on a deadline that doesn't move.
That's this role. You'll be the person we hand NALA's hardest cross-functional bets to: getting our EU licence over the line, taking Rafiki virtual accounts live across the UK and EU, and rebuilding how cash moves through the business. You'll sit in London, work across Product, Compliance, Finance, Treasury and our entity ops teams in Nairobi and India, and you'll be measured on whether the thing shipped — not on how good the deck was.
This is a special-projects seat, not a project-management seat. If the interesting part of a project for you is the slide pack rather than the unblocking, this isn't your role.
🎯 Your Responsibilities in this Role
- Own NALA's highest-stakes cross-functional programmes end to end: EU licensing, Rafiki virtual accounts going live in the UK and EU, stablecoin rails, from problem definition through to the thing actually being live.
- Drive the EU licence application to completion, coordinating Compliance, Legal, Finance and our EU entity, and holding the timeline when a dozen other priorities pull at it.
- Rebuild how we manage cash across entities and corridors, diagnose where money is trapped, design a better structure, and get Finance and Treasury to adopt it.
- Tighten the entity ops structure: Across Nairobi and India, clearer ownership, fewer handoffs, processes that survive the next 2x of volume.
- Decide what we work on next, pressure-test the portfolio of ops projects, force-rank by impact, and kill the ones that aren't earning their place.
- Get to root cause: Use data (you'll be writing your own SQL) to find why a process is breaking rather than papering over the symptom.
- Make senior stakeholders move: Most of your stakeholders are in London and senior; a large part of the job is landing alignment without authority.
- Leave the process behind you: Every project should end with an owner, a runbook and a metric, not with you still holding it.
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🚫 What this role is not
- It isn't a strategy seat. You will build the plan, and then you will be the one chasing the last five things that stop it shipping. Roughly 70% execution, 30% strategy and the 70% is the point.
- It isn't a PMO seat either. We're not looking for someone to move cards across a board and chase status. You're expected to have a view, argue it, and own the outcome.
- It's ambiguous by design. You'll be handed problems that nobody has scoped yet, in a business that changes shape every quarter. If you need a clean brief to start, you'll find this hard.
- Alignment is part of the job, not a blocker to it. Getting Compliance, Finance and Product to a shared answer is the work. "They wouldn't move" isn't an outcome.
🔥 Must-have requirements
Experience
- 2–3+ years in a high-calibre, fast-paced problem-solving environment, top-tier strategy consulting (MBB), top-tier IB, or a founder's-associate / strategy & ops seat at a high-growth startup.
- Crucially, time inside an operating company, not just advising one. We're looking for consultant-grade structure paired with a genuine bias to execution. Pure advisory backgrounds with no in-house delivery experience will struggle here.
- A track record of owning complex projects end to end, with outcomes you can point to shipped, live, measurably better.
Knowledge
- Strong commercial and operational judgement in a regulated or otherwise complex environment, financial services, payments, compliance-heavy industries, or similar. You understand why the constraints exist.
- Working understanding of how a cross-border payments or financial operation actually runs: flows, counterparties, reconciliation, risk.
Skills
- SQL — this is a must. You pull your own data, build your own view of the problem, and don't wait on an analyst to tell you what's happening.
- Structured problem-solving. You can take something vague and large ("our cash management is inefficient") and break it into a sequence of answerable questions with owners and dates.
- Cross-functional programme leadership. You can run a programme spanning Compliance, Product, Finance and an offshore ops team, and keep all of them moving without formal authority over any of them.
- Root-cause thinking. You're the person who asks "why" a fourth time when everyone else has settled for the first answer.
- Clear written communication. Short docs that make a decision easy, not decks that defer one.
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💪 Nice to have requirements
- Python or R alongside SQL — useful, not essential.
- Direct exposure to licensing or regulatory applications (EMI, PI, or equivalent) in the UK or EU.
- Experience with crypto or stablecoin rails, or an informed view on where they fit in cross-border payments.
- Treasury, cash management or FX operations exposure.
- Experience working with teams across multiple geographies and time zones — particularly Africa or Asia.
✅ Success in the role looks like
3-Month Metrics
- Owning the EU licence programme end to end — you've taken the plan off your manager's plate, know every open item and blocker, and the application is measurably closer to submission than the day you joined.
- A credible read on the ops portfolio — you've mapped what's live, force-ranked it, and can defend what we should stop doing.
- Trusted by senior stakeholders — Compliance, Finance and Product come to you with problems rather than waiting to be chased.
6-Month Metrics
- Rafiki virtual accounts live in the UK and EU, with you having led the cross-functional path to get there.
- The EU licence secured or in final-stage review, with a clear, owned path to the finish line.
- Cash management materially improved — a documented, adopted structure with named owners, and a measurable reduction in trapped or idle cash.
- The entity ops structure clarified across Nairobi and India, running without you needing to be in the middle of it.
➡️ Interview Process
You will need to first submit your application through our ATS, Workable. There is no need to submit a cover letter.
If successful, you'll be invited into our interview process:
[45 mins] Talent Screen — Talent Team
We'll get to know you, your motivations and your track record, and cover the practical basics of the role. Best preparation: know why you applied, and be ready to talk through what you've actually owned.
[45 mins] Hiring Manager Interview — Head of Global Ops
A deep dive on your project experience: the impact you've had, how you've solved problems across functions, and how you operate in busy, resource-constrained environments. Best preparation: know your own CV cold, and bring specifics.
[Case Study] Live problem-solve + discussion
A realistic NALA operations problem, worked through live with the hiring team. We're assessing structure, judgement and how you handle being pushed — not whether you memorised a framework.
[45 mins] Bar Raiser — Benjamin Fernandes, CEO
Track record, ambition and cultural fit — and your chance to hear the NALA story from the top and ask anything you like.
We'll then take references and come back to you with a decision.
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