---
title: 'Lead People Partner - Technology at M-KOPA'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/lead-people-partner-technology-m-kopa-lagos-jjtpyxy6qx3a'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-07'
---

# Lead People Partner - Technology at M-KOPA

- **Company:** [M-KOPA](https://feeny.ai/companies/m-kopa)
- **Location:** Lagos, Nigeria
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-09-01
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-07
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/m-kopa/a13017dd-a4df-4e30-bf31-57c5bb58568d

## Job description

[https://app.ashbyhq.com/api/images/user-content/1d985516-2a99-43c0-b591-957f5adaceb9/5ac97b31-49cd-4012-8bb0-5caf15e33c69/B25.png]

Join our growing People team! We're hiring a Lead People Partner to own the people agenda for our Technology organisation as M-KOPA scales the infrastructure behind financial inclusion for everyday earners across Africa.

[https://app.ashbyhq.com/api/images/user-content/1d985516-2a99-43c0-b591-957f5adaceb9/98cde4bc-fa0a-4874-a12e-0db70c8c4abf/image.png]

The Impact 🌍

Your leadership will directly shape how we build, retain and grow the engineering talent powering our mission. We've now reached 10 million customers and unlocked $2+ billion in credit across five African markets. This role sits right at the centre of the machine that makes that growth possible.

[https://app.ashbyhq.com/api/images/user-content/1d985516-2a99-43c0-b591-957f5adaceb9/98cde4bc-fa0a-4874-a12e-0db70c8c4abf/image.png]

The Opportunity

💚 Mission-driven HR: Partner directly with our CTO and their leadership team across Engineering, Data, Analytics, IT and Security — work that translates straight into digital and financial access for everyday earners

🏆 Global recognition: Join a company named by TIME 100 as one of the world's most influential, and by the Financial Times as Africa's fastest-growing company for 5 consecutive years (2022–2026)

🚀 Scale challenges: Design the org structure for a globally distributed, senior engineering population spread across Africa, Europe and the UK — scaling and reshaping at the same time

🌱 Environmental impact: Work for a carbon-negative company that has displaced over 2 million tonnes of CO₂ emissions

## What You'll Do

You'll act as trusted advisor to our engineering, data and platform leaders, aligning people strategy to roadmap execution and organisational evolution. You'll hold overall accountability for people partnering across the full Technology and Product organisation, with one Senior People Partner reporting to you covering Product and adjacent functions. Your own focus is Engineering: a globally distributed, senior population where genuine fluency in how engineering organisations are built, levelled and retained matters far more than adjacency to them.

Day to day, you'll:

- Lead org design: workforce planning, levelling and team transformation in a function scaling and reshaping simultaneously
- Own Engineering and Product end to end: full accountability for people partnering across both, with a Senior People Partner reporting to you
- Lead and grow a partner: coach, develop and set direction for your direct report, building the partnering standard for the whole technology portfolio
- Use people analytics to inform action: partner with Centres of Excellence to turn data into decisions on capability, attrition and cost
- Drive distributed team effectiveness: optimise performance, engagement and team dynamics in a fast-paced, asynchronous, multi-country environment
- Handle complex employee relations: own the senior and sensitive end of the ER caseload for your portfolio

## Your Environment 💻

- Reporting line: People Director, alongside a peer group of senior partners covering our operating markets
- Client group: CTO and their leadership team across Engineering, Data, Analytics, IT and Security, plus accountability for Product via your direct report
- Team: one Senior People Partner reporting to you
- Population: globally distributed, senior engineering talent, majority based across Africa, Europe and the UK

Our Approach 🚀

- We scale and reshape our engineering function at the same time, so org design here is a live, ongoing discipline, not a one-off project
- We hold both a portfolio and a team in this role, which is unusual even within our own People function
- We lean on Centres of Excellence for data and specialist ER support, freeing you to focus on judgement and stakeholder relationships
- We expect direct engagement with C-level leaders, with genuine autonomy attached

## What You Need

We're looking for someone who has partnered closely with engineering, data or platform leadership in a scaling technology or fintech business, and genuinely understands how those functions work.

Required Experience:

- Senior HR experience partnering with engineering organisations in a scaling technology or fintech business
- Experience leading or formally coaching HR business partners, with the ability to raise the standard of someone else's work
- Proven org design depth: you've led real structural change (levelling, spans and layers, function redesign), not just supported it
- Strategic and operational range: equally comfortable designing long-term org strategy and working at team level
- Remote and global savvy: experience supporting cross-cultural teams across multiple regions
- Strong business acumen: able to translate between people priorities and business outcomes at leadership level
- Comfortable operating with autonomy at C-level
- Employee relations judgement across more than one jurisdiction, knowing when to own it and when to bring in specialists (UK/Europe employment law exposure is useful given where much of the engineering population sits, but not essential — we have an ER Centre of Excellence for statutory depth)

[https://app.ashbyhq.com/api/images/user-content/1d985516-2a99-43c0-b591-957f5adaceb9/86f7fe83-cdac-44e5-95f4-5cfc1d36c035/image.png]

Location & Benefits

- Hybrid Working: 1-2 days on-site per week in Lagos office
- Reports to the People Director
- Professional development and coaching partnerships
- Family-friendly policies and flexible working arrangements
- Well-being support and career growth opportunities
- Direct exposure to our CTO and CPO, with real influence over leadership-level people decisions

## Our Mission 🌍

We create financial inclusion for the traditionally excluded through a fair, flexible, customer-centric financing model, driving greater inclusion of women, youth and low-income communities.

Our Impact 💚

- Included 🔓: 10 million customers, $2+ billion in credit unlocked since 2010
- Prosperous 💰: 70% of customers use their M-KOPA product for income generation, 35,000 livelihoods created for sales agents
- Green 🌱: over 2.1 million tonnes of CO₂ avoided, with 127,700 circular economy products sold since 2010

Ready to shape the people strategy behind a technology function scaling financial inclusion for millions? Apply today!

WHY M-KOPA?

At M-KOPA, we empower our people to own their careers through diverse development programs, coaching partnerships, and on-the-job training. We support individual journeys with family-friendly policies, prioritize well-being, and embrace flexibility.

Join us in shaping the future of M-KOPA as we grow together. Explore more at m-kopa.com http://m-kopa.com.

[https://app.ashbyhq.com/api/images/user-content/1d985516-2a99-43c0-b591-957f5adaceb9/369018b8-cf9c-49c7-95f1-1d414482ba57/B13.png]

Recognized four times by the Financial Times as one Africa's fastest growing companies (2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026), named on CNBC's World’s Top Fintech Companies 2025 & 2026 and by TIME100 Most influential companies in the world 2023 and 2024 , we've served over 10 million customers, unlocking $2 billion in cumulative credit for the everyday earners across Africa, in addition to over 10,000 e-bikes financed in Kenya.

[https://app.ashbyhq.com/api/images/user-content/1d985516-2a99-43c0-b591-957f5adaceb9/481f6724-8375-4f39-b514-fbe00b8fc3b5/B13.png]

Important Notice

M-KOPA is an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer committed to assembling a diverse, broadly trained staff. Women, minorities, and people with disabilities are strongly encouraged to apply.

M-KOPA explicitly prohibits the use of Forced or Child Labour and respects the rights of its employees to agree to terms and conditions of employment voluntarily, without coercion, and freely terminate their employment on appropriate notice. M-KOPA shall ensure that its Employees are of legal working age and shall comply with local laws for youth employment or student work, such as internships or apprenticeships.

M-KOPA does not collect/charge any money as a pre-employment or post-employment requirement. This means that we never ask for ‘recruitment fees’, ‘processing fees’, ‘interview fees’, or any other kind of money in exchange for offer letters or interviews at any time during the hiring process.

Applications for this position will be reviewed on a rolling basis. Shortlisting and interviews will take place at any stage during the recruitment process. We reserve the right to close the vacancy early if a suitable candidate is selected before the advertised closing date.

If your application is successful M-KOPA undertakes pre-employment background checks as part of its recruitment process, these include; criminal records, identification verification, academic qualifications, employment dates and employer references.

## About M-KOPA

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: M-KOPA is a leading African fintech platform that provides affordable financial and digital products to cash-based earners, enabling them to finance everyday essentials through daily micropayments.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Growth Stage)
- **Headquarters**: Nairobi, Kenya (Global HQ with additional offices in London, UK)
- **Founded**: 2010
- **Founders**: Jesse Moore (CEO & Co-Founder) and Nick Hughes

## Core Business
- **Primary Industry**: Fintech / Financial Services
- **Target Customers**: B2C focused on "Every Day Earners" — underserved, cash-based entrepreneurs and individuals across Sub-Saharan Africa who lack formal collateral, credit history, or a monthly salary.
- **Mission/Purpose**: "To make financing for everyday essentials accessible to everyone." Their core mission is to "finance progress" for millions of unbanked and underbanked people.

## Products & Services
- **Smartphone Financing**: The core entry product. Customers pay a small deposit (e.g., ~$35) followed by daily micro-instalments (~$0.50/day) via mobile money (like M-Pesa) to own a smartphone. This is the primary gateway to the digital economy.
- **Digital Loans**: After building a repayment credit history, customers can access small, flexible digital loans on an instalment basis.
- **Hospital Coverage (Insurance)**: Affordable health insurance packages offered via the same daily micropayment model.
- **Device Protection**: Insurance for the financed smartphone.
- **Affordable Data Bundles**: Digital subscriptions and data packages available on a similar instalment basis.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed. However, M-KOPA has raised substantial growth capital from top-tier global investors.
- **Key Metric**: Over **$1.5 billion in cumulative credit deployed** to more than **5 million customers** across Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana, and South Africa. [m-kopa.com](https://www.m-kopa.com/about)
- **Notable Investors**: Includes **Generation Investment Management** (co-founded by Al Gore), **Sumitomo Corporation**, and other leading impact and growth investors. Board members often come from these firms. [m-kopa.com](https://www.m-kopa.com/about)
- **Growth Signals**: M-KOPA now employs over **3,000 staff members** and has a direct sales force of over **30,000 agents**. The company operates one of the largest smartphone assembly factories in the region, producing over 1 million phones locally. [wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Kopa)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Proprietary Tech & Data Stack**: Processes over **1 million payments daily**, using AI-driven analytics to create credit records for individuals with no formal financial history. This is a deep, defensible data moat.
- **Asset-Light Distribution**: A massive, managed direct sales force of 30,000 agents provides a powerful on-the-ground distribution network that is hard to replicate.
- **Customer-Centric Lending**: Offers "Inclusive, Fair, and Flexible" terms. No collateral or proof of income required. Customers can return a product, get their deposit back, and be released from obligations if they cannot pay. This builds immense trust. [m-kopa.com](https://www.m-kopa.com/about)
- **Vertical Integration**: From smartphone assembly to fintech lending to digital services, M-KOPA controls the entire value chain, creating a sticky ecosystem.

## Strategic Focus
- **Deepening Financial Services**: Expanding beyond smartphone financing into digital loans, insurance, and health coverage to become a comprehensive financial partner.
- **Geographic Expansion**: Already in 5 African countries (Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa) with potential for further market entry.
- **Leveraging AI for Credit Scoring**: Constantly improving their proprietary data models to offer more products and better manage risk for a traditionally "unscoreable" population.
- **M-KOPA Labs**: A research arm that deploys grants to test new technologies and extensions of their platform. [wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Kopa)

## Why Work Here
- **Purpose-Driven Mission**: The work directly impacts financial inclusion and poverty alleviation for millions across Africa. A deeply motivating "why."
- **Rapid Growth & Scale**: Operating in a high-growth environment with a team of 3,000+, providing significant opportunities for career advancement and tackling complex, real-world problems.
- **Global, Pan-African Team**: A diverse team with a "proudly Pan-African footprint" and offices in London, offering a unique cultural experience.
- **Flexible Work**: Offers hybrid and remote working options that suit the demands of the role. [m-kopa.com](https://www.m-kopa.com/careers)
- **Strong Benefits Package**: Includes comprehensive health plans, learning & development resources, and recognition & rewards. They emphasize a culture of "Progress, Excellence, and Humility." [m-kopa.com](https://www.m-kopa.com/careers)
- **Engineering Culture**: Known for building a world-class tech stack from scratch for a unique market.

## Sources
1. [m-kopa.com/about](https://www.m-kopa.com/about)
2. [m-kopa.com/careers](https://www.m-kopa.com/careers)
3. [wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Kopa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Kopa)
4. [uk.linkedin.com/company/m-kopa](https://uk.linkedin.com/company/m-kopa)
5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/m-kopa](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/m-kopa)

## Other roles at M-KOPA

- [Stock Controller - Wa](https://feeny.ai/job/stock-controller-wa-m-kopa-wa-ffn6xr433nz2) — Wa
- [Head of Workplace IT](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-workplace-it-m-kopa-johannesburg-96w8c64vbqy0) — Johannesburg, South Africa
- [Finance Transformation Manager — M-KOPA](https://feeny.ai/job/finance-transformation-manager-m-kopa-m-kopa-south-africa-8h4c93kfdnk0) — South Africa
- [Product Technician - Mobility](https://feeny.ai/job/product-technician-mobility-m-kopa-nairobi-2haw8zjx0h47) — Nairobi, Kenya
- [Senior People Partner – Product & Functions](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-people-partner-product-functions-m-kopa-london-8x83npx3gfrp) — London, United Kingdom
- [Senior People Partner – Product & Functions](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-people-partner-product-functions-m-kopa-lagos-g1kk4kpjq11m) — Lagos, Nigeria
- [Lead People Partner - Technology](https://feeny.ai/job/lead-people-partner-technology-m-kopa-london-4hwgnm2kxejh) — London, United Kingdom
- [Head of Operations](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-operations-m-kopa-uganda-4msjc2gat4e4) — Uganda
- [Telesales Representative – Inbound](https://feeny.ai/job/telesales-representative-inbound-m-kopa-accra-p0bjmyhqp0vr) — Accra, Ghana
- [Senior Sales Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-sales-manager-m-kopa-ghana-byem536jrj1v) — Ghana