We invest in visionary teams with transformative ideas.

Join Canaan's extended family.
companies
Jobs

Head of East Africa

Taptap Send

Taptap Send

Nairobi, Kenya
Posted on Aug 22, 2025

Location

Nairobi

Employment Type

Full time

Department

Markets

Our Mission
Reduce inequity by helping immigrants move money home, and become the leading cross-border fintech for emerging markets.

The Team
-> Founded by Harvard grads / 3rd-time founders --- also founded Segovia (successful exit) and GiveDirectly (>300M revenue, fastest-growing NGO).
-> Top performers from top and varied organizations (e.g., Bain, Bolt, Google, McKinsey, SafeBoda, Uber, Zipline) --- we like moving fast, and we hire people that do as well.
-> Driven by mission, guided by values (see below) – in deed, not just word.
-> Team as global as the mission, >30 languages from 25 countries (i.e., if you’re interested in learning to make Chicken Moambe, we’re the place).

About Us
Taptap Send is backed by top VCs (Spark, Canaan, Reid Hoffman, Breyer Capital, etc.), rapidly growing and a great place for those looking for both impact and a fast-paced tech startup environment. Read more about the journey in Reid Hoffman’s words or TechCrunch article

Launched in 2019, Taptap is tapping into a transformative shift in global finance: from banks to phones. While this has affected wealthier countries as well, it has been nothing short of a revolution for the emerging markets where the overwhelming majority of population had been unable to access digital finance previously. Taptap Send allows immigrants to send money home instantly and with no fee*, saving money in the process. With a formal market size of >700B alone, we’ve got a lot more saving to do for our users. Our mission is to reduce inequity by helping immigrants move money home, and become the leading cross-border fintech for emerging markets. And that’s just the beginning...

*We charge fees for transfers on fixed exchange rate corridors (e.g., XOF, XAF).

Our Investors
Spark Capital, Canaan, Reid Hoffman, Breyer Capital (Jim Breyer), Unbound (Shravin Mittal), Wamda (Fadi Ghandour), Firstminute Capital, Slow Ventures (Sam Lessin), Helios Partners (Souleymane Ba), Crossbeam Ventures (Ali Hamed), Nikesh Arora, Samih Toukan, and many other context-specific angels

Role

As the Head of East Africa, your role will be to develop and scale Taptap Send’s supply side partnerships in East Africa and grow our user base. You will be excited to manage every aspect of growth in said markets: customer acquisition and retention strategy, pricing, user research, product quality, customer experience, team development and coaching. You will have an acute “own it” mindset, equally obsessed with the experience of individual users as with iterating and optimizing scalable growth tactics and processes.

You will have P&L ownership, delivering the growth and profitability targets for the East Africa market. You will seek to establish TTS as the leading product/service for sending remittances to East Africa, whilst being the “face” of East Africa both internally and externally. Reporting directly into our Chief Commercial Officer, as well as building and leading a team of growth managers on the ground in sending markets, the role offers the chance to join an early-stage, high growth startup and to have a positive impact on the communities we serve.

Responsibilities

Strategy & Execution

  • Establish a vision, strategy, and execution plan for East Africa (launching and scaling sending and receiving markets)

  • Think creatively about driving adoption, improving profitability, and increasing brand awareness

  • Report to the executive leadership team on progress, insights, and needs with a data-driven, test-and-learn mindset

  • Monitor, understand, and interpret growth, operational, and financial metrics to improve execution

Partnerships & Stakeholder Engagement

  • Build trust-based relationships with diaspora communities and commercial partners in East Africa to strengthen brand awareness and unit economics

  • Collaborate closely with internal stakeholders (Customer Service, Finance, Tech, Legal, Compliance, People Ops, etc.)

Growth & Customer Experience

  • Own growth tactics across sending countries: customer acquisition and retention, pricing, user research, product quality, and customer experience

  • Recommend product improvements based on market, competitor, and customer insights

Team Leadership & Development

  • Lead the team on the ground to execute collaboratively aligned timelines

  • Hire, inspire, develop, and retain top, diverse talent

  • Own team development and coaching

Requirements

  • Preference for Nairobi, Dubai or London base

  • Ability to travel internationally periodically and ad-hoc to meet banks, regulators, disbursal partners, internal stakeholders and customers

  • Keen interest in understanding the East African diaspora

  • Advanced stakeholder management capability

  • Experience building, developing, managing and leading teams multi-regionally.

  • Understanding of the regulatory landscape of East Africa (financial regulation is advantageous)

  • Strong analytical skills and ability to make data-driven decisions.

  • 7 to 15 years experience in a fast paced and high growth-environment such as startups, operations, consulting, finance, or similar

  • An acute “own it” mindset, equally obsessed with the experience of individual users as with iterating and optimizing scalable growth tactics and processes

Also you are

  • Outgoing - you love speaking to people and enjoy building meaningful relationships

  • Execution Oriented - we have an ‘impact first’ philosophy and a lot to get done. You should be able to take an idea to implementation

  • Mission Oriented - you are passionate about working for a net positive organisation / tech for good

  • Organised - you have a system for how you approach your work that can keep you on track in a scrappy startup environment

  • Driven - you thrive in a fast-paced, target oriented company

Taptap Values

Impact first

Team next

Accept reality

Propose solutions

Win with grit

Be proactively candid, with yourself and others

Love the particular

Own it

Create positive energy

Maybe, even have fun

Taptap Send is an equal opportunity employer dedicated to building an inclusive and diverse workforce. All employment decisions are decided on the basis of qualifications, experience and business need. We strongly encourage applications who are members of underrepresented communities to apply.

If you require reasonable adjustments to be made during the recruitment process, please do not hesitate to let us know. Any information you provide us in this respect will only be used to accommodate your requirements.

Note: we recognize imposter syndrome is real - any candidate that does not perfectly fit every characteristic of this role is still strongly encouraged to apply.