Partnerships Lead for Cameroon
Nala
👋 About Us
NALA is building Payments for the Next Billion. Faster, smarter, and fairer transfers for everyone. Since 2022, we've grown our business 120x, grown the team from 9 to 150+, raised $50M+ from top-tier investors, and were named to the Forbes Fintech 50 in 2025.
We operate two core products:
- NALA, our consumer app making cross-border payments cheaper, faster and more reliable for the global diaspora. Allowing users to send money from the UK, US and EU to Africa and Asia.
- RAFIKI, our B2B payments infrastructure, is powering global payments.
Our team includes alumni from Wise, Stripe, Monzo, Revolut, and CashApp — operators who’ve scaled world-class products. We act with urgency, think deeply, and put our customers first always.
At NALA, this isn’t just a job. It’s ownership, impact, and the chance to change global payments forever.
Join us in building Payments for the Next Billion.
🙌 Your Mission
We are hiring a Country Partnerships Lead to act as our primary representative on the ground. This is a commercial, general manager type role. You will be the key "boots-on-the-ground" operator, supporting our P&L and Sales leads. Your main objective is to help execute on country targets, unblocking any problems that stand in the way of our team's success.
🎯 Your Core Responsibilities
Commercial & Sales Support
- Be the go-to local expert for our Sales and P&L leads. You’ll need to quickly learn the product and support them in pitching and landing deals.
- Identify and close execution gaps to enable commercial success in the market.
- Help qualify and pursue partnership opportunities with banks, fintechs, FX and other partners.
Execution & Ops Unblocking
- Be the on-the-ground executor—whether that’s resolving payment issues with a bank, chasing down a regulatory document, or delivering an agreement in person.
- Represent Rafiki and NALA in the market across day-to-day operations, ensuring no delay is caused by our absence on the ground.
- Escalate and solve problems across teams: finance, operations, sales, and compliance.
Regulatory & Market Presence
- Own relationships with local regulators and ensure we remain compliant with all relevant local requirements.
- Act as the public face of Rafiki in-country—engage at conferences, represent us in industry working groups, and contribute to building our brand reputation.
- Ensure local governance, reporting, and corporate obligations are fully met.
- Commercial & Sales Acumen: You must have proven "selling acumen" in selling B2B and a strong commercial mindset as well as track record of executing and sustaining partnerships.
- Execution Focus: A demonstrated ability to execute on targets and get things done in the local market.
- Local Problem Solver: You are a "boots-on-the-ground" operator who can navigate local institutions (like banks, fintechs etc) to unblock issues.
- Collaborator: Ability to work in support of multiple leaders (P&L lead, Growth lead) and central teams (Ops, Finance).
- Local Presence & networking: Must be based in-country to satisfy regulatory requirements and manage local relationships. Must be able to build relationships across organisations. Must have an existing network in the local market
🌍 Location & Language Requirements
- Must be based in Douala, Cameroon.
- Fluency in English and French required.
➡️ Interview Process
You will need to first submit your application through our ATS Workable. There is no need to submit a Cover Letter.
If successful you will be selected for our interview process which has 4 stages:
- [30mins] Interview with the Talent Team: We want to understand your experience and motivations
- [1 hr] Interview with the Hiring Manager: A deeper dive into your CV and real-world experiences
- [1 hour] Take Home task & Task review interview: Includes a short exercise based on a fictional but realistic task. You’ll present and discuss it with your potential manager and someone else in the team
- [30mins] Leadership Interview: A final conversation with a member of our leadership team to discuss your task submission, motivation for the role and to give you space to ask your own questions
- References: We conduct reference checks as standard for all of our hires at NALA
- Decision: We’ll aim to come back to you with a timely decision and feedback on your overall interview process.
✅ Success in the role looks like
🟢 30 Days – Establish Foundations
- Map and shortlist 5+ high-potential FX and payout partners with the ability to improve our market performance
- Unblock 1 key issue locally (e.g. partner delay, regulatory document, ops friction)
- Launch weekly market insight updates covering FX trends, competitors, and policy shifts
🟡 60 Days – Execute and Prove Value
- Onboard a partner that will significantly impact market metrics
- Present 1 actionable recommendation to influence pricing, payout routing, or cost reduction
- Design and deliver a Local Trading Playbook (V1)
🔴 90 Days – Deliver Impact and Scale
- Achieve a measurable FX, payout cost or reliability improvement (e.g. spread, speed, uptime)
- Build and qualify pipeline of 2+ new commercial partners
- Deliver consistent onground competitor or market analysis that improves market strategy
- 27 Days Off: Take the time to decompress. Working at a startup is hard!
- Birthday Leave: Celebrate your special day with a bonus day off to take off in that month.
- Learning Budget: Fuel your growth with $1000 annually for learning and development.