Senior Principal, Talent Marketing

Description

In 2024 the Financial Times ranked the company as Africa's fastest-growing fintech. It serves over 10 million business and individual accounts and processes billions of dollars in transactions each month.

The company has built high-volume financial infrastructure for commerce in emerging markets and is now expanding globally.

As Senior Principal, Talent Marketing, your first job is to build the company's talent brand and candidate pipeline in new 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 in Europe, where they spend their time and what makes them apply.

You will start from a blank page with a high degree of autonomy. Your task is to turn the global Employer Value Proposition into localized talent marketing that converts, linking Talent Acquisition, Engineering Leadership and Brand through community work, in-person events and targeted campaigns that end in hires.

First 30 days: map the competitive landscape and developer talent dynamics in Poland and Spain, agree priority pipelines with technical hiring leads and TA leads, and audit current employer brand materials for localization gaps.

First 90 days: run a pilot developer meetup or physical event in Poland with a complete post-event pipeline funnel, release a European recruiter enablement toolkit with localized pitch decks, outreach sequences and technical one-pagers, and start marketing sprints for the top 3 hardest-to-fill senior technical roles.

First 6 months: establish the company as a recognized engineering hub in Poland that supports its founding engineer cohort, and deliver qualified, pre-warmed candidate pipelines toward the ramp to 500 tech and product hires, with multi-channel attribution showing which initiatives produce quality hires.

Year one: finish the International Talent Expansion Playbook for future tech hubs, shorten time-to-fill and raise direct outbound response rates across European technical roles, and make the company the employer of choice for Europe's most ambitious engineers.

Responsibilities

• Set the talent go-to-market strategy for the newest engineering hubs, mainly Poland and Spain, with localized narratives aimed at experienced software engineers.
• Build a 'Founding Team' story for early European engineers centred on technical scale, system complexity and ownership.
• Work out how developer communities in Poland, Spain and the UK differ and design a separate engagement model for each rather than reusing one playbook.
• Plan and lead the company's presence at developer conferences, engineering meetups, hackathons and university partnerships in target markets.
• Design follow-up systems and nurture funnels that turn event attendees into screened candidates for TA partners.
• Use your knowledge of where engineers gather online, such as GitLab and GitHub communities, tech forums, Discord and Slack groups, Meetup and Eventbrite, to engage in an authentic way.
• Work with TA leads and Engineering Directors to find urgent hiring bottlenecks and run multi-channel campaigns for hard-to-fill technical disciplines.
• Turn technical architecture, distributed systems problems and fintech infrastructure into rigorous technical messaging that stands out from local competitors.
• Build recruiter tools, including outbound pitch decks, technical one-pagers, culture materials and messaging sequences, to raise recruiter outreach conversion.
• Judge 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 dedicated talent marketing budget, scaling what delivers hires and quickly stopping what underperforms.
• Run paid recruitment marketing on technical platforms when outbound and community channels need acceleration.
• Advise the Head of Talent Acquisition, VP of Engineering and Brand Leadership on talent market intelligence, competitor positioning and developer sentiment.
• Document a global talent expansion playbook with scalable frameworks for future international markets.
• Guide broader TA and brand team members, and mentor or manage junior talent marketing specialists as the function grows.

Requirements

• 8+ years leading talent marketing, technical recruitment marketing or developer relations, with much of that time spent hiring software engineering and product roles.
• Proven experience building talent brand and hiring pipelines across European tech markets, 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 geographies or building talent brand where employer brand was nascent or absent, writing playbooks from a blank page.
• Experience in fast-growing fintech, high-frequency or payments infrastructure, or high-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 building the candidate journey that follows to produce hires.
• Solid understanding of software engineering culture and stacks, including distributed systems, backend, infrastructure and DevOps, plus developer channels such as Meetup, Eventbrite, GitLab, GitHub, Reddit and tech conferences.
• High agency and comfort with ambiguity: you make decisive bets, test hypotheses and build structure in fast-moving environments.
• Ability to turn EVP strategy into practical sprint-based campaigns that support an aggressive plan of 500+ tech hires.
• Hands-on experience running and optimizing paid digital recruitment ads independently across social and developer networks.

Conditions

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

Benefits

• Work on the engineering backbone of Africa's fastest-growing fintech as it scales globally.
• Own the work with autonomy, dedicated budget and direct executive sponsorship.
• Help shape a new engineering hub from its start, including its culture, talent standards and brand identity.
• Competitive base salary calibrated for Senior Principal level, performance bonuses, comprehensive private healthcare and pension schemes.