HEAD OF DESIGN | M-KOPA

Elevate Design's Strategic Influence in One of Africa's Most Innovative Fintechs

Lead Design That Powers Financial Inclusion for Millions

From our vibrant Nairobi headquarters, you'll have the opportunity to reshape how design drives business strategy and customer experience at a crucial growth moment. As M-KOPA's Head of Design, you'll lead and evolve our Product Design function, ensuring cohesive, high-quality user experiences across all touchpoints for customers across multiple African markets.

Your Strategic Impact

This isn't just a design leadership role—it's a chance to demonstrate how exceptional design directly contributes to business success and customer empowerment. You'll sit at the intersection of business strategy and user needs, translating complex financial products into intuitive, accessible experiences that often serve as a customer's first entry point into formal financial services.

Your design leadership will help transform lives: A small business owner who can easily navigate loan management tools. A first-time smartphone user who confidently explores financial services. A family that easily tracks their payment progress toward ownership of essential devices. These real-world outcomes start with the design experiences you'll oversee.

What Makes This Role Unique

At M-KOPA, design isn't an afterthought—it's central to our mission of creating transformative financial partnerships. You'll co-lead alongside other functional heads to drive cross-functional alignment, maintaining a horizontal perspective across our entire product ecosystem. Your deep understanding of our products and competition will inform strategic design decisions that differentiate M-KOPA in the market.

Working from Nairobi puts you at the heart of one of Africa's most dynamic tech hubs, with direct access to our core market and the ability to observe firsthand how customers interact with our products. You'll experience the immediate impact of your work while helping build design capacity in a region experiencing tremendous growth in digital innovation.

Your Day-to-Day Influence

Each day will bring diverse challenges that stretch your design leadership capabilities:

You might start your morning collaborating with Product Management and Tech leadership to define overall UX strategy for a new financial product. By midday, you could be reviewing design work to ensure quality and cohesion before release, asking the challenging questions that elevate good design to great design.

Your afternoon might involve mentoring members of your hybrid team, fostering a sense of belonging while helping them advance their careers and focus on their strengths. Later, you might meet with the marketing team to ensure visual cohesion across the M-KOPA brand, aligning tone of voice, brand guidelines, and design systems.

Throughout it all, you'll be demonstrating the business impact your design team is having, translating design metrics into business outcomes that executives understand and value.

Must-Have Qualifications:

• Proven experience leading design teams and complex projects in digital products, preferably in fintech or similar industries

• Deep understanding of UX strategy with the ability to balance business goals with user needs across multiple touchpoints

• Experience building and maintaining design systems that ensure visual cohesion while enabling rapid innovation

How Your Experience Will Create Impact

Your background in design leadership will find new purpose at M-KOPA. Your ability to facilitate complex projects while maintaining a broad perspective will help us navigate growth challenges. Your understanding of design systems will create consistency across our expanding product offerings. And your talent for mentoring will build design capacity that extends beyond M-KOPA into the broader African design community.

The design function you build won't just serve today's needs—it will scale to meet tomorrow's opportunities as M-KOPA continues expanding across markets. Your leadership will help us maintain our innovative edge while ensuring our experiences remain intuitive and accessible to all users, regardless of their financial or technological literacy.

Join Us in Nairobi

Based at our Nairobi headquarters, you'll be immersed in one of Africa's most vibrant tech ecosystems. You'll collaborate with talented colleagues who share your passion for impact-driven design. You'll have the opportunity to see firsthand how your design decisions influence customer experiences and business outcomes.

At M-KOPA, we foster a culture where design excellence is celebrated and design thinking is embedded throughout the organization. Your leadership will further elevate this culture, creating an environment where designers thrive and their work directly contributes to our mission of financial inclusion.

Your Growth Journey With Us

As you lead our design function, you'll also have opportunities to grow your own career. You'll gain expertise in designing for inclusive financial services across diverse markets. You'll develop leadership skills that span business strategy and creative direction. And you'll build a network that extends across Africa's burgeoning tech landscape.

Why This Role Will Transform Your Career

This position offers far more than just another step up the design leadership ladder. Here's why this role will be uniquely rewarding:

You'll be at the epicenter of Africa's fintech revolution, based in Nairobi—one of the continent's most innovative tech ecosystems and the birthplace of mobile money. Kenya's vibrant startup environment provides a rich context for design innovation, with M-KOPA standing at the forefront of financial inclusion technology.

As you shape our UX-focused culture during this crucial scale-up phase, you'll establish design patterns and systems that will influence how millions interact with financial services, often for the first time. Your work won't just impact M-KOPA—it will help define how design functions in African fintech more broadly.

You'll lead the integration of AI-enhanced design processes, finding new ways to leverage technology while maintaining the human-centered approach essential for our diverse customer base. This blend of cutting-edge technology and meaningful social impact creates a professional experience unlike any other.

The relationships you build across East Africa's tech community, the design expertise you develop in emerging markets, and the business acumen you gain from positioning design strategically—all these will become invaluable assets in your career journey.

Ready to Lead Transformative Design?

If you're excited about applying your design leadership to create meaningful change at scale, we want to hear from you. Join M-KOPA and help us continue building transformative financial partnerships through the power of exceptional design.

Your design vision can change how millions experience financial services. Are you ready to lead the way?

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.

Recognized thrice by the Financial Times as one Africa's fastest growing companies (2022, 2023 and 2024) and by TIME100 Most influential companies in the world 2023 and 2024 , we've served over 5 million customers, unlocking $1.5 billion in cumulative credit for the unbanked across Africa.

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.