Product Owner in London

African businesses import $700 billion worth of goods and services per year but paying their suppliers abroad remains a massive challenge. Their options today are limited to traditional banks and the black market. Going through banks means poor customer service, high transaction costs and unfavorable exchange rates. Transactions that should take a few days end up taking weeks and cost merchants up to 9% in fees. The situation is equally dire for consumers who pay some of the highest P2P transfer fees in the world and are stuck with mobile money technology that is now decades old. We are building Kappa to fix that. Our cross-border payments platform is designed for ultra low-cost, near-instant money transfer at significantly higher transaction sizes than what’s currently possible. Our mission is to break down the barriers that have held back African businesses for decades.

Kappa is looking for a Product Owner to join the team and help scale up our cross-border payments platform in Africa and beyond. Coming in early, you will take full ownership of the product across mobile and web and be end-responsible for delivering value to customers. Part of a globally distributed team spread across Africa, Europe and the Middle East, this role comes with significant autonomy, and offers a chance to help build a massive business that will have a positive impact on millions of lives. Our platform has processed over $1 billion across tens of thousands of transactions for African businesses, but we are just getting started. We have big ambitions as we scale up in existing markets and roll out in new ones, and we are looking for someone with matching ambition to drive that expansion.

What you'll do

• You'll take end-to-end ownership of our web and mobile apps — from talking to customers and framing the problem, through the requirements and the design, to what the numbers say in production.
• You’ll drive the product roadmap — Decide what we build next (and what we don't), working in close collaboration with sales, operations, and the leadership team.
• You’ll work in a tight feedback loop with engineering — Specify the what and the why, leverage a world-class engineering team for the how, and stay close while it gets built.
• You’ll spend real time with the people who use our product — Importers and exporters in Africa, from SMEs to multi-nationals, and our sales and operations teams on the ground who talk to them every day.
• You’ll design flows for reliability, robustness and scale — You'll spend as much time on what happens when a transaction fails or gets stuck as on the happy path.

Requirements

• 5+ years in product management. Experience with fintech products (payments, lending, banking) is a hard requirement. Plus points for cross-border payments and for building in emerging markets.
• Payments fluency — Settlement, reconciliation, chargebacks, RFIs, treasury and liquidity. You treat KYC, AML and licensing as constraints that factor into the design from day one, not as blockers that show up late.
• Writing that makes building unambiguous — Problem, customers, success criteria and constraints come before any solution. Two engineers (or coding agents) reading your spec independently would build the same thing.
• Design judgment and the ability to act on it — You can say why one screen works better than another in terms of what the customer is looking to achieve. You’re able to produce the flows yourself using AI-driven tooling (e.g. Pen.dev, Claude Design) rather than relying on a designer.
• Technical credibility — You can read an API schema or contract, follow an architecture discussion, and know when a requirement you've written is accidentally expensive or comes with hidden complexity. You have a sense for what’s hard vs easy to build.
• Range and operating across layers of context — You can give the CEO the two lines that matter and the engineer the edge case that breaks the design, and go deeper when needed.

Benefits

• Highly competitive salary and equity — top of market. We believe in hiring fewer but better people and paying them more.
• Health, dental and vision insurance (for you and your dependents).
• Work fully remotely from any Africa-friendly timezone (GMT-2h to GMT+3h). Regular travel to Africa to meet with customers, sales and operations on the ground will be required.
• New MacBook Pro and up to $2,000 for home office equipment (headphones, chair, standing desk, etc.).
• Parental leave / family-friendly culture.
• Generous paid time off.