Lead People Partner - Technology at M-KOPA

About the job

• 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.

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