Lead AI Engineer

We are recruiting to fill the position below:

Job Title: Lead AI Engineer - Financial Inclusion

Location: Lagos (Remote)

The Impact

• Your automations and agents will directly improve how 2,300+ employees work across our global operations.
• We've already helped over 7 million customers access over $2 billion in credit - and the tools you build will help that mission scale further and faster. It's your chance to be part of something that's literally transforming lives across an entire continent.

The Opportunity

• Scale challenges: 2,500+ employees across Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, the UK, and Europe - internal teams that can't scale by hiring forever need intelligent tooling that actually works
• Global recognition: Join a company named by TIME 100 as one of the world's most influential and by the Financial Times as Africa's fastest-growing for 4 consecutive years (2022–2025)
• Environmental impact: We're carbon-negative, having displaced over 2 million tonnes of emissions
• Mission-driven engineering: Every automation you build helps internal teams and customer-facing staff deliver financial inclusion to Africa's Every Day Earners

What You'll Do

• At M-KOPA, you'll lead the AI Operations team from day one - owning delivery, growing the function, and proving the value.
• Your team builds automations and agents for internal use and serves as internal consultants, helping Engineering integrate AI into customer-facing products.
• Join us in combining cutting-edge AI tooling with purpose-driven work that makes digital and financial inclusion possible across Africa.

Your key responsibilities

• Help refine AI training for the wider organisation, including Engineering teams
• Prioritise efficiently — manage competing requests from multiple teams by applying a clear prioritisation framework you'll help develop and improve
• Build and ship automations and agents that measurably improve how internal teams and customer-facing staff work
• Stay current on emerging AI tools and technologies - know what's hype and what's actually useful
• Keep the AI tooling stack healthy as usage scales across 2,500+ employees
• Lead two AI Ops Engineers — own their delivery, development, and day-to-day work

Technical Environment:

• Existing Foundation: Twelve months of Claude, Notion, HiBob, and Entra automations already running in production.
• AI & Agentic Frameworks: Claude, Claude Code, Anthropic tooling, LangChain, MCP, Google ADK (or similar agentic tooling)
• Enterprise Tooling: Identity automation (Entra), internal platforms, Notion, HiBob integrations
• Automation & Prototyping: Scripting, workflow tools, AI-assisted development, rapid prototyping (Vercel/Railway)

Our Approach:

• Cut through the hype — evaluate emerging AI tools on practical value, not marketing buzz
• Product-focused mindset — treat internal teams as customers and build tooling that works
• Build, don't just advise — this is a hands-on team that ships working automations and agents
• Prove the value, then expand — start with two engineers, demonstrate impact, grow from there

Required Experience:

• Hands-on experience building automations — scripting, workflow tools, or AI-assisted development
• Hands-on experience building agents using agentic frameworks — LangChain, MCP, Google ADK or similar
• Background in enterprise tooling — rapid prototyping tools (Vercel/Railway), identity automation (Entra), or internal platforms
• People leadership experience — you've led or mentored engineers and can own a team's delivery and development.

What You Need

• We're looking for someone with a strong technical background and product-focused.
• You won't be building models - we have Data Science teams for that. You'll be building agents, shipping automations, and leading a team that makes M-KOPA's internal operations smarter and faster.