Description💙 Our mission
At Rafiki, we are building Africa’s most reliable payment infrastructure for global businesses.
Payment reliability is a big pain point for our customers (read more about it here from Benji, our CEO). We see this in our experience running the NALA App, we also hear it from our customers' experience with other apps (including, LemFi, TapTapSend, SendWave, Wise etc). Rafiki attempts to solve this once for the industry.
In the last 12 months, we have seen incredible demand from the African business community and have grown the Rafiki business from a 3-person organisation to a 27-person organisation. We have seen real traction with our client base and multi-million dollar disbursements in the first 3 months. Join us on this exciting journey to solve one of Africa's biggest business challenges!
🙌 Your Mission
Expand and optimise the disbursement network for the Rafiki product, delivering a reliable, secure, and customer-focused pay-outs experience. Collaborate with sales, operations, and compliance to ensure the solution is scalable and supports rapid growth while solving real customer problems.
Focus on expanding pay-outs across Africa (and beyond) while strengthening capabilities in key markets. Prioritise usability, security, and reliability to meet customer and business needs.
Success in this role requires exceptional cross-functional collaboration, a customer-first mindset, and the ability to balance long-term strategy with the immediate priorities of a scaling business.
🎯 Your Responsibilities in this Role
- Bring a sense of urgency to your work and inspire the team to unite under your leadership to deliver an incredible product
- Work with a team of engineers to develop the Rafiki pay-outs network in line with customer demand, business need and technology capabilities.
- Take full ownership to drive the product and business-planning process across cross-functional teams of the company
- Drive the execution of all product lifecycle processes for products, including product research, market research, competitive analysis, planning, positioning, roadmap development, requirements development, and product launch
- Develop product positioning and messaging that differentiates Rafiki and its features across primary market segments
- Collaborate with design, engineering, research, legal, and compliance teams to refine your plan and execute it effectively
- You’ll be speaking to customers on a near daily basis to understand needs and ultimately sticking to our ethos of “customer first, always”
- Assess current competitor offerings to seek opportunities for differentiation
- Develop an understanding of our users at a deep level and gauge customer needs to propose prospective solutions
- Define initial product proposition and go-to-market strategies for new expansion markets
- Meeting with the C-suite to discuss financial data and ways to improve business operations
🔥 Must-have requirements
- You have 5+ years of product management experience shipping world-class products at fast-growing companies and have had demonstrable engagement with Design, Engineering and Leadership teams
- Hands-on experience with B2B integrations in a financial services/fintech company
- Experience in working with third parties, whether it’s evaluating APIs and capabilities, mapping out integration plans or evaluating different technology options
- Proven experience shipping client-driven solutions within the financial services / fintech arena
- You have hands-on experience with SQL to interrogate product data yourself to make more informed decisions. We understand that perfect data is not available, but knowing what pragmatic assumptions can be made to drive reasonable decisions is very important
- You have enough engineering context to know a bad MVP implementation from a good one and have experience with product discovery methodologies
- You have strong empathy for customers and an unwillingness to compromise on user-centric design
💪 Nice to have requirements
- Has context of client needs from a UK, African and Asian perspective
- Experience with cross border payments or building payments infrastructure solutions
- In addition to English, you can also speak French or Swahili
➡️ Interview Process
- Talent Screen with our People team (30-45 minutes)
- Competency call with Thomas, Product Manager, Rafiki (30 minutes)
- Written task and Task Review Session (45 minutes)
- Cross collaboration Interview with our Rafiki team (This might be someone from Sales, Engineering or Treasury) - (45 minutes)
- Leadership call with Nico Eddy, COO & Nico Esteves CTO
⭐️ Benefits
UK / EU / Kenya:
- 35 Days Off: Enjoy an amazing 35 days of holidays to unwind and explore.
- Birthday Leave: Celebrate your special day with a bonus day off to take off in that month.
- Enhanced Parental Leave - We offer 16 weeks of full pay for the primary caregiver and 4 weeks of full pay for the secondary caregiver (After a 6-month probationary period)
- Global Workspace: Get access to WeWork locations worldwide.
- Learning Budget: Fuel your growth with $1000 annually for learning and development.
For people who come to our London office, we also have the below extra benefits:
- Hybrid Working: We work in the office three days a week (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday).
- Sarabi: Themed snacks and Friday lunch focused on building great working relationships with the team.
- Monthly Socials: Join fun social events every month for great times.
- Free Coffee: Enjoy barista-style coffee at your fingertips.