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NALA is a fintech company building cross-border payments infrastructure for the next billion users. Since 2022, the company has grown 120x, scaled from 9 to 150+ employees, raised $50M+ from top-tier investors, and was named to Forbes Fintech 50 in 2025. NALA operates two core products: a consumer app enabling cheaper, faster cross-border transfers from the UK, US, and EU to Africa and Asia, and Rafiki, a B2B payments infrastructure platform.
This Strategy & Operations Manager role sits in Global Ops and owns NALA's highest-stakes cross-functional initiatives end-to-end. You will drive the EU licensing application to completion, coordinate the launch of Rafiki virtual accounts across the UK and EU, rebuild cash management structures across entities and corridors, and tighten entity operations in Nairobi and India. You'll work across Product, Compliance, Finance, Treasury, and international ops teams, with primary accountability for shipping outcomes rather than process.
Key responsibilities include: owning complex multi-team programmes from problem definition through live launch; driving the EU licence application while coordinating Compliance, Legal, and Finance; diagnosing cash flow inefficiencies and designing better structures; establishing clearer ownership and processes across international entities; prioritizing the ops project portfolio by impact; using data analysis (including SQL) to identify root causes; and building alignment with senior stakeholders without direct authority. Each project should conclude with a documented owner, runbook, and success metric.
This is fundamentally an execution role (70% execution, 30% strategy). It is not a PMO seat focused on status tracking, nor a pure strategy role. The position is intentionally ambiguous—you'll receive unscoped problems in a rapidly evolving business and are expected to have strong judgment, argue your position, and own outcomes. Alignment across Compliance, Finance, and Product is part of the core work, not a blocker.
Required experience: 2–3+ years in high-calibre, fast-paced problem-solving environments such as top-tier strategy consulting (MBB), investment banking, or a founder's associate / strategy & ops role at a high-growth startup. Critically, you must have hands-on operating experience inside a company, not just advisory experience. You should have a track record of owning complex projects end-to-end with demonstrable shipped outcomes.
Required knowledge: strong commercial and operational judgment in regulated or complex environments (financial services, payments, compliance-heavy industries); working understanding of cross-border payments operations, flows, counterparties, and reconciliation; familiarity with fintech or payments infrastructure.
