Head of Data, Technology & AI

Jackfruit Finance lends to the people who educate a continent. We provide working capital, project, and asset finance to low-fee private schools, the schools that teach the children with the fewest alternatives and that formal credit markets will not touch.

Since inception, we have financed 1,022 schools and 72 SMEs across Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, reaching 305,265 children and 13,004 teachers, and 70.3% of the school directors we back are women. We financed our 1,000th school this year.

We are scaling on three fronts at once:

• Set how Jackfruit uses AI and run the platform it sits on. Decide which tools and models we use, manage cost, and make sure every agent and automation has an owner, clear permissions, human gates where needed, run logging, and a measurable purpose. Build and ship agents yourself.

• We want staff across the company building tools with AI. Give them the standards, templates, data access, training, and review path to do it well, and be the central point of control: nothing goes into production without connecting to the right data, meeting security standards, and having a user who will actually use it. Retire what is not used.

• Own the automation of the process flows that make a lending company work, including but not limited to lead qualification, KYC, credit assessment and credit scoring, investment committee memos, contract and security documentation generation, repayment schedule generation, disbursement, payment posting, customer communications, collections, portfolio monitoring, and credit bureau and regulatory reporting. Much of this is already in place but not yet perfect. Your job is to refine each piece, measure it against real outcomes, and bring the pieces together into one connected flow. This involves building AI agents and ML tools.

• Own, build, and improve AI-powered systems that are customer-facing, including agents that enable customers to apply for loans and receive customer support, marketing, and other interactions through AI agents.

• Ensure data is accurate at the point of entry and flows cleanly between systems. Maintain one authoritative source for every key metric, make sure portfolio numbers reconcile everywhere, keep the data documentation (diagrams, dictionaries) current, and run the dashboards leadership relies on. AI is only as good as the data underneath it, and that data is yours.

• Musoni is live as our system of record. Own it on an ongoing basis: correct usage, accurate data, product configuration and change control, vendor management, and clean integration with the CRM and the SSL app. Retire the remaining legacy tools it replaces. Build new tools on top of it for new automations.

• The School Support Lead (SSL) app is how Jackfruit and the school support leads in the field talk to each other, and it works well today. Own its roadmap, spend time with the field team to understand what they need, and keep it connected to Musoni and the wider data flow so field activity and loan data stay together.

• Maintain a tight roadmap, run quarterly planning, sprints, and standups, and drive work to completion rather than leaving a trail of half-finished projects. Give the CEO and the leadership team clear, ongoing visibility into status, priorities, and tradeoffs, and gatekeep what does and does not get built.

• As a regulated lender, Jackfruit has to get security, compliance, and audit right. Own access control, backups, secrets, audit logs, data protection, and IT audits with regulators and other stakeholders, and extend the same discipline to every AI agent and staff-built tool.

• Directly manage a small team covering engineering, data, and IT support. Prioritize their work, unblock them, and own their reviews and growth. The team will stay small. This includes oversight of the IT help desk, ensuring issues are triaged and resolved through a well-run process.

• You take it personally that things get done and that they get used.

• You prioritize ruthlessly; you can get everyone from the CEO to the developers focused on the single most important thing, and you roll up your sleeves to ship rather than waiting for someone else to.

• You are a builder who likes making other people builders: you would rather give a credit officer the tools and guardrails to solve their own problem than add it to a queue.

• You communicate exceptionally well in both directions: you give leadership true, clear visibility into what is happening, and you understand what non-technical users actually need.

• You pull your own numbers in SQL, you build with AI coding tools every day, and you can read and review what others ship. Nobody can sell you a story about why something is hard.

• AI fluency with production results. You have built and shipped AI agents and automations that real teams use every day, and you can show the before and after. You know how to evaluate an agent against real outcomes, control its cost, and put the right guardrails and human checks around it. This is a builder’s track record, not a point of view about AI.

• Ownership of system-of-record. Previous experience owning a system-of-record and ensuring it is accurate and well-functioning.

• Experience governing a stack that many people build on. You have set standards, access controls, and review processes that let non-engineers build safely, and you have kept a growing set of tools connected, documented, and used rather than sprawling.

• A deep understanding of loan products and lending operations. Five or more years in lending, microfinance, or other relevant financial services. You know how origination, credit assessment, documentation, disbursement, repayments, collections, and portfolio metrics (PAR, outstanding) actually work, and how the parts of a lending business connect. You have automated or materially improved these flows before.

• Hands-on data fluency. You independently write SQL to pull and reconcile numbers. You can design a clean, simple data model, own the integrity of data flowing between a core banking system and the tools around it, and establish a single source of truth by personally getting into the data. Experience with a core banking platform (Musoni or similar) is a strong plus.

• A security and controls mindset. You have owned access, audit, and data protection in a regulated or audited environment, and you build controls in from the start rather than after an incident.

• Emerging markets experience. You have operated in an emerging markets context and understand its realities.