About the position
1. Technology & Architecture Leadership
Ability to define and own a multi-year platform and technology strategy.
Proven experience architecting modular, cloud-native, microservices-based platforms.
Expertise designing open, API-first architectures that support rapid partner integration.
Strong understanding of scalability, reliability, observability, security, interoperability.
Experience building high-performance systems capable of real-time decisioning (e.g., sub-50ms pricing/matching).
2. Multi-Sided Marketplace Expertise
Deep experience leading or building multi-sided platforms (consumers, producers, partners).
Ability to optimize liquidity, time-to-match, conversion, and repeat engagement.
Understanding of cold-start challenges, network effects, and disintermediation risks.
Experience developing trust & safety systems, including ratings, dispute management, KYC/AML, and risk scoring.
Ability to balance incentives and maintain neutrality, enabling competitors to participate without bias.
3. Data, AI & Experimentation
Strong experience building data & AI flywheels that improve matching, pricing, fraud detection, and personalisation.
Proficiency with machine learning, including causal inference and reinforcement learning.
Ability to design and run experimentation frameworks (A/B tests, marketplace experiments).
Strong background in data governance, data engineering principles, and event-driven design.
4. Openness & External Innovation
Experience translating business or ecosystem problems into external innovation contests.
Ability to ensure IP hygiene, solution readiness, and rapid integration of winning solutions.
Demonstrated capability in running developer ecosystems (portals, SDKs, sandboxes).
Ability to accelerate partner onboarding through standardised procurement & compliance processes.
5. Product & Country Scale-Up
Experience launching technology across multiple markets, ideally with Pan-African exposure.
Ability to maximize technology reuse and minimize localisation complexity.
Skill in orchestrating large-scale deployments across digital, physical, and hybrid ecosystems.
Understanding of regulatory, linguistic, and infrastructure variances across African countries.
6. Governance, Trust & Safety
Ability to design market-fit governance models for formal and informal participants.
Experience implementing ratings, dispute workflows, fairness models, and safe enablement for new user types.
Understanding of ecosystem neutrality and how governance strengthens network effects.
7. Leadership & Cross-Functional Orchestration
Ability to operate with speed and rigor, delivering quarterly outcomes.
Experience leading multidisciplinary teams: engineering, data science, product, architecture, DevSecOps.
Strong stakeholder engagement skills; can partner with ecosystem, partnerships, and openness leaders.
Founder-style ownership mindset: participant-centric, value-sharing, and ecosystem-first.
Ability to coach and align country teams and operational orchestrators.
8. Experience & Background
15+ years leading technology platforms, ecosystem products, or marketplace engineering teams.
Proven delivery of multi-sided platforms with network effects.
Strong technical experience in:
Cloud-native architecture
Microservices
APIs
ML/AI
Experimentation frameworks
Marketplace analytics
Experience with contests/innovation pipelines, developer ecosystems, and rapid tech transfer.
Pan-African scale-up experience essential.
Desired Skills:
- Technology platform strategy
- platform architecture
- cloud-native architecture
