Senior Principal, Talent Marketing

Description

The company was ranked by the Financial Times in 2024 as Africa's fastest-growing fintech. It serves over 10 million business and individual accounts and processes billions of dollars in transactions each month. It has built high-volume financial infrastructure for commerce in emerging markets and is now expanding globally.

This is a senior role for building talent brand and candidate pipelines in new European markets from zero. The company is not yet a well-known consumer brand there, so you will need to understand how senior engineers, engineering managers and technical leaders weigh career moves across Europe.

You will start with a blank page and high autonomy, adapting the global employer value proposition into local talent marketing that converts. You will connect Talent Acquisition, Engineering Leadership and Brand, using community involvement, in-person events and targeted campaigns to turn brand interest into closed engineering hires.

Responsibilities

• Set the talent go-to-market strategy for the newest engineering hubs, mainly Poland and Spain, with local narratives that appeal to demanding software engineers.
• Position early European engineers as founding builders, with stories about technical scale, system complexity and ownership that attract senior technical talent.
• Assess how developer communities differ between Poland, Spain and the UK, and design a separate engagement model for each rather than reusing one playbook.
• Choose and lead the company's presence at developer conferences, meetups, hackathons and university partnerships in target markets, both in person and online.
• Build follow-up systems and nurture funnels so event attendees become screened candidates for the TA partners.
• Use knowledge of where engineers gather online, such as GitLab, GitHub, Discord, Slack, Meetup and Eventbrite, to drive genuine engagement.
• Work with TA leads and Engineering Directors to find urgent hiring bottlenecks and run multi-channel campaigns for hard-to-fill technical disciplines.
• Turn architecture, distributed systems and fintech infrastructure challenges into accurate, technically rigorous messaging that stands out from local competitors.
• Give technical sourcing and recruitment teams narrative assets such as outbound pitch decks, technical one-pagers, culture materials and outreach sequences meant to double recruiter response rates.
• Measure every initiative by pipeline contribution, qualified applicant rate, candidate quality score, cost-per-hire and time-to-fill, and ignore vanity metrics.
• Own and allocate the talent marketing budget, expanding programs that produce hires and quickly stopping those that underperform.
• Oversee paid recruitment advertising across relevant technical platforms when outbound and community channels need a boost.
• Advise the Head of Talent Acquisition, VP of Engineering and Brand Leadership on market intelligence, competitor positioning and developer sentiment.
• Document a global talent expansion playbook with frameworks that can be reused in future international markets.
• Guide broader TA and brand colleagues, and mentor or manage junior talent marketing specialists as the team grows.

Requirements

• At least 8 years leading talent marketing, technical recruitment marketing or developer relations, with substantial time spent hiring software engineering and product roles.
• Proven experience building talent brand presence and hiring pipelines across European tech ecosystems, including Central and Eastern Europe such as Poland, and Western or Southern Europe such as the UK or Spain.
• A track record of entering new markets or scaling a talent brand where the employer brand was new or absent, building playbooks from scratch.
• Experience in fast-growing fintech, high-frequency or payments infrastructure, or large-scale distributed systems.
• Experience working with international founding teams or distributed tech hubs in emerging and mature markets.
• Extensive hands-on experience designing physical and digital developer events and the candidate nurturing that follows to produce hires.
• A real understanding of software engineering culture, tech stacks such as distributed systems, backend, infrastructure and DevOps, and developer channels including Meetup, Eventbrite, GitLab, GitHub, Reddit and tech conferences.
• High agency and an entrepreneurial approach, with the ability to make decisive calls, test hypotheses and build structure in fast-moving environments with a lot of uncertainty.
• Ability to turn high-level EVP strategy into practical, sprint-based hiring campaigns that support an aggressive plan of 500+ tech hires.
• Direct experience running and optimizing paid digital recruitment ads on social and developer networks without close supervision.
• First 30 days: map the competitive landscape and developer talent in Poland and Spain, align with technical hiring leads and TA leads on immediate priority pipelines, and audit existing employer brand collateral for local messaging gaps.
• First 90 days: launch a pilot in-person developer meetup presence in Poland with a complete post-event conversion funnel, roll out a localized European recruiter toolkit including pitch decks, outreach sequences and one-pagers, and start marketing sprints for the top 3 hardest senior technical roles.
• First 6 months: establish Poland as a recognized, appealing engineering hub that supports the pride of the founding engineers, consistently supply qualified, pre-warmed pipelines toward the goal of 500 tech and product hires, and show multi-channel attribution for which community and marketing efforts produce quality hires.
• First year: finish the International Talent Expansion Playbook for use in future tech hubs, measurably reduce time-to-fill and raise direct outbound response rates across all European technical roles, and strengthen the company's standing as a top employer for Europe's most ambitious engineers.

Conditions

Work spans Europe, with target markets including Poland, Spain and the UK.

The company is an equal opportunity employer that values diversity and works to be inclusive of all employees and candidates.

Benefits

• Help build the engineering base of Africa's fastest-growing fintech as it scales globally, in a career-defining role.
• Build from scratch with autonomy, dedicated budget and direct executive sponsorship.
• Help create engineering hubs from the start, shaping culture, talent standards and brand identity.
• Competitive base salary calibrated for Senior Principal level, performance bonuses, comprehensive private healthcare and pension schemes.