People Experience & Development Lead

The Opportunity

We're building a People and Talent team whose impact grows as PawaPay scales, with everyone focused on the value they bring and automation taking care of process and admin. This new role owns the employee experience across the lifecycle, the platforms and data that run it, and the reward, engagement and performance frameworks that shape how people experience working here.

This is a builder role and a senior individual contributor one. You'll be the design engine behind how people experience PawaPay: career conversations that help people grow, the way managers give feedback, the behaviours we expect from leaders as we scale. Some of it you'll build yourself, and some you'll get built with colleagues. We want someone who loves building automations, agents and workflows, and would happily ship one this week and improve it next week.

You'll inherit strong foundations and a close-knit team, partnering with our People and Talent Coordinator (who owns onboarding) and our Ops and Exec Support Lead on day-to-day operations. Overall people strategy sits with the Head of People and Talent; recruitment, hiring workflows and the recruitment platform sit with the Talent Lead. Much of what you'll own is being designed as we go, and team growth will follow evidence of need. You'll also give ad hoc in-country support, such as office help or events, where you're based.

What You'll Own

• AI and automation. Design, build and maintain automations, workflows and AI agents across our people platforms, from simple triggered workflows to internal agents that answer employees' regular questions. You set the standard for how People and Talent works AI-first.
• Platforms and data. Own our people platforms and the data layer beneath them. Connect them following our recent review, keep data clean and build guardrails (validation rules, alerts, review steps) that catch errors before they reach payroll or compliance.
• Lifecycle experience. Own the journey through development, internal moves and offboarding, connecting seamlessly with onboarding. Set the longer-term strategy for how the employee experience evolves across every market.
• Compensation and levelling. Run our comp and levelling process end to end, and partner with the Head of People and Talent on comp philosophy and job architecture. Deliver robust market mapping, a real-time view of total reward for everyone, and training so managers deliver comp outcomes with confidence.
• Engagement and performance. Run our flagship engagement surveys and make sure they produce action leaders follow through on. Analyse performance data in aggregate, help evolve how we recognise and reward performance, and equip managers for strong performance and career conversations.
• Key moments and complex contracts. Support managers and employees through parental leave, bereavement, relocation, underperformance and harder casework, drawing on specialist counsel where needed. Keep policies current across markets, and template and automate our more complex employment contracts in one secure place.
• Culture and training. Build rituals, processes and moments that carry our values into a remote team of 160 and beyond. Design and deliver training that improves key experiences across the lifecycle.

What Success Looks Like

Within your first 12 months, success will look like:

• Manual work removed. Measurable hours of admin automated or eliminated, processes moved off spreadsheets and workarounds into our platforms, and an employee help agent people actually use.
• Connected, trusted data. Our people platforms are integrated, with guardrails catching errors before they reach payroll or compliance.
• Reward delivered well. Comp cycles run on time, pay sits within bands, and managers feel confident having comp conversations.
• Surveys that lead to change. Survey commitments are delivered on time, and the scores they targeted are moving.
• A better experience. Employee and leaver feedback improves, and managers feel well supported through complex people situations.

What We're Looking For

What you'll bring

• Lifecycle experience at pace. Significant experience across the employee lifecycle in a fast-growing, international business, ideally remote-first and multi-jurisdiction. You can point to experiences you've designed or improved and the difference they made.
• A builder's instinct with AI and platforms. You've owned HR platforms and made them work together, and you build automations, agents and workflows yourself, using tools like Claude day to day.
• Data fluency. Highly numerate and comfortable building your own analysis to spot where the experience breaks down, make the case for change and show whether it worked.
• Hands-on reward. You've built or evolved job architecture, run market benchmarking and delivered comp cycles, and you talk openly about pay with managers and employees.
• People partnering across jurisdictions. You've coached managers through performance conversations and sensitive situations, with working knowledge of employment practice in several countries, including drafting and managing contracts.
• Engagement and training that land. You've turned survey data into action leaders followed through on, and designed training that changed how people work, with evidence to show it.

Nice to have

• Experience in African markets.
• A recognised HR qualification in the country where you're based.
• A strong network in the people community and a habit of bringing outside ideas in.

You don't need to tick every box. If this role excites you and you can see how your experience fits, we'd like to hear from you.