Original listing text, shown exactly as published by the company.
Your Mission
You will ensure lemon.markets delivers a fast, reliable, and compliant customer lifecycle so our partners can launch and scale investment products with confidence. Sitting in the 1st Line of Defense (1LoD), you’ll lead Customer Ops, KYC Ops, and AFC Ops and make sure day-to-day operations run smoothly while meeting regulatory expectations. You’ll report to our Head of Operations and work closely with Banking Ops and Securities Ops, plus key stakeholders in our Customer Lifecycle domain (Product & Engineering) and our 2nd Line of Defense (Compliance/Risk). Over the first months, your focus will be to bring a fresh, data-driven perspective, quickly diagnosing the biggest drivers of volume, risk, and customer pain. You’ll build a clear prioritization roadmap and execute it. Your main mission is to turn the department into a highly automated machine by redesigning workflows and automating as much as possible (while keeping compliance guardrails intact).
In this role you will
- Develop and lead a team of FTEs and working students across Customer Ops, KYC Ops, and AFC Ops, setting clear expectations, coaching, and building a high-ownership culture.
- Run and improve day-to-day performance across the lifecycle by steering SLAs, backlogs, cycle times, quality, and rework, ensuring customers and partners get predictable, reliable outcomes.
- Establish an operating system for the area (daily/weekly reviews, capacity planning, queue/skill management) that makes priorities, bottlenecks, and decisions transparent.
- Own and evolve KYC operations (onboarding, verification, document checks, remediation, periodic reviews where relevant) with strong QA standards, sampling, and root-cause work to reduce KYC aging and risk.
- Own AFC case & alert operations including evidence collection, escalation logic, and audit trails to ensure defensible decisions and strong audit readiness.
- Partner with Product, Engineering, and 2LoD to translate regulatory and operational needs into scalable workflows, permissions, logging, and controls and ensure every change is operationally ready (SOPs, training, rollout/support).
- Lead automation initiatives across the whole Ops function by eliminating manual work through workflow automation, decision engines, etc. driving efficiency, consistency, and faster turnaround times while reducing operational risk.
- Own vendor management and communication, ensuring external partners/tools meet our requirements for performance, scalability, and auditability.
You’ll be successful in this role if you
- Bring multi-year operations experience in a regulated environment (FinTech/Banking) having hands-on expertise across Customer Service Ops, KYC Ops, and AFC Ops. Brokerage experience is a strong plus.
- Have proven people leadership experience (coaching, performance management, hiring and capability building).
- Show a strong track record in performance management (SLA steering, QA frameworks, backlog & capacity planning).
- Are excellent at cross-functional stakeholder management with Product & Engineering (requirements, change management, rollouts) and have experience working with a 2nd Line of Defense.
- Are hands-on and structured. You like turning ambiguity into operating cadence, clear priorities, and measurable outcomes.
- Are fluent in English (C1+) and have some German Skills (B1-B2), and comfortable communicating with internal and external auditors.
How we take care of you
- 🚀 Compensation package: We offer you a competitive salary, based on your experience and the value-add you bring to lemon.markets.
- 🕑 Flexible working hours: We trust people to choose when they work best and avoid a rigid 9 to 5 mindset. You decide on the rhythm that helps you do your best work, with only shared core hours from 12:00 to 16:00 to support collaboration.
- 🏢 Hybrid work setup: You can work from anywhere in Germany within a hybrid model. At the same time, in-person collaboration is a key part of our culture. That being said, leadership lemoneers work 7 days or more per month on-site in our Berlin office, spending quality time together with the team at events, onsites/offsites or over team dinners.
- 📈 Grow with us: We take your personal development seriously! You’ll get regular mentorship and stretch opportunities, a clear career development framework with frequent feedback conversations as well as an annual learning budget.
- 🌱 People & culture: You’ll feel our culture in the small things, like polaroids from our lemoneers’ first day, Friday food market strolls at Maybachufer, and our monthly new-joiner breakfast. But also in the bigger things: celebrating the onboarding of new partners, growing our teams, and owning a strong discussion culture.
- 💛 Perks & benefits: We choose benefits that add actual value. We sponsor a Deutschlandticket for employees on unlimited contracts, plus 50% off on Beatvest - our partner for financial education and investing.
- 🏝 Workation: Get out of here! At lemon.markets you can work remotely from anywhere in the EU for up to 10 consecutive days at a time, and up to 60 days per year in total.
As an equal opportunity employer, lemon.markets is committed to building an inclusive workplace. The company welcomes people from all different backgrounds, including age, citizenship, ethnic and racial origins, gender identities, individuals with disabilities, marital status, religions and ideologies, and sexual orientations to apply.
If you feel this role could be a great match for you even if you don’t tick every box, we’d still love to hear from you, please apply.…
