Chief of Staff

We are recruiting to fill the position below:

Job Title: Chief of Staff

Location: Lagos
Employment Type: Full-time

About the Role

• You are an operator: someone who takes a problem, structures it, and drives it to a conclusion with limited hand-holding and high standards.
• The portfolio is deliberately broad and will shift with the company’s priorities: one week you might be preparing investor materials and coordinating a data room; the next, you could be on the ground in a new market scoping a launch or sitting in a meeting with a regulator.
• The Chief of Staff sits at the center of BFREE’s operations, working directly alongside the founders and leadership team across every vertical of the business. You are not a scheduler or a note-taker.
• You will be exposed to every dimension of a fast-growing African fintech including strategy, operations, commercial, fundraising, and expansion earlier than almost any other role at your stage would offer.

Key Responsibilities

• Attend meetings with external stakeholders; banking partners, regulators, shareholders.
• Own discrete special projects end to end: market entry assessments, operational deep-dives, partnership scoping, process improvement initiatives.
• Prepared, attentive, and ready to support follow-through on whatever comes out of them.
• Travel across the continent regularly to support expansion, stakeholder engagement, and wherever the work takes you.
• Step into fires: when something breaks or needs urgent attention, you diagnose quickly, bring structure, and help the team move through it.
• Support BFREE’s pan-African expansion by conducting on-the-ground research, building local relationships, and helping stand up new market operations.
• Track cross-functional workstreams, flag blockers early, and keep the organisation aligned on what matters most.
• Contribute to fundraising efforts, building presentations and data packs, researching investors, coordinating logistics, preparing briefing notes ahead of meetings.
• Support the founders across strategic priorities including structuring problems, building analyses, and following through on execution so nothing falls through the cracks.
• Produce board-quality outputs: concise memos, sharp slide decks, structured analyses that allow leadership to make fast, well-informed decisions.

Requirements

• Genuine comfort with ambiguity. The brief will shift, the priorities will change, and you will need to adapt without losing momentum.
• At least 2 years of experience in a front-office role at a Tier 1 management consulting firm (McKinsey, BCG, Bain, or equivalent), a Tier 1 investment bank, or a Venture Capital / Private Equity firm. You have been trained to think rigorously and work at pace.
• High ownership and follow-through: you do not hand problems back, you do not need constant direction, and you hold yourself accountable for outcomes rather than activities.
• An interest in or existing connection to the African tech and financial services landscape.
• Knowledge of GenAI, prompt coding will be an added advantage.
• The maturity to engage with senior stakeholders including founders, board members, institutional investors, regulators, professionally and without needing to be managed.
• Fluency in English. French, Arabic or Swahili is an advantage.
• Strong analytical and structured thinking skills. You can break down a messy problem, build a clean model or framework around it, and communicate your findings clearly.
• A willingness to travel extensively across Sub-Saharan Africa as a regular part of the role.