Senior Venture Builder, Jobtech Alliance
Contractor
About us
BFA Global is an impact innovation firm that combines research, advisory, venture building, and investment expertise to build a more inclusive, equitable, and resilient future for underserved people and the planet. We partner with leading public, private, and philanthropic organizations, both global and local, to catalyze innovation ecosystems for impact across emerging markets.
About the Jobtech Program
In late 2021, the Jobtech Alliance was launched by BFA Global and Prosper Global, a Pan-African ecosystem-building initiative around inclusive jobtech in Africa. The Jobtech Alliance has a portfolio of grants for acceleration activities with jobtech startups and for wider ecosystem-building. We learn by doing, conduct research to better understand what makes these innovations work (or not), and explore emerging themes to help define and guide the sector. Digital Advancement for Women Now (DAWN) is a project in Nigeria that enables underserved young people, with a particular focus on young women, alongside refugees and displaced people and persons with disabilities, to access safe, inclusive and dignified work through jobtech startups.
About the Role
The Senior Venture Builder will play a critical role in helping DAWN's portfolio of jobtech and digital platforms grow, strengthen their business models, and expand their capacity to create dignified, sustainable and inclusive work opportunities for financially disadvantaged youth. The role combines hands-on venture building with strategic advisory, experimentation, technical assistance, and ecosystem engagement. The Senior Venture Builder will work directly with exceptional founders and leadership teams to diagnose constraints, identify growth opportunities, design and execute targeted interventions, and translate business growth into measurable transition-to-work outcomes.
This is a highly hands-on role. The Senior Venture Builder will be expected not only to advise companies but to work alongside founders to solve hard problems, test solutions, analyze data, build and launch experiments, and drive implementation and execution.
This role will report to the Head of Venture Building and work closely with the Investment Lead, other Venture Builders, BFA specialists, consortium partners, and external experts to ensure each startup engagement delivers meaningful business and employment outcomes, and contributes to the wider DAWN program objectives.
Key responsibilities
Support Platform Selection & Portfolio Development (5%)
Contribute to building a strong pipeline and portfolio of platforms aligned with DAWN's objectives.
Identify companies capable of reaching underserved workers beyond traditional urban technology ecosystems.
Assess companies for commercial potential, scalability, founder capability, work-creation potential, inclusion, and strategic fit.
Contribute to due diligence and company-selection processes.
Where required, take platforms through our selection committee process, including contracting with the Project Manager
Surface emerging sectors, platform models, and business models with potential to generate significant employment and income opportunities.
Identify cross-portfolio opportunities where companies can collaborate
Lead Venture Building Engagements (65%)
Lead complex venture-building engagements with selected jobtech and digital platforms from initial diagnosis through execution and learning.
Proactively experiment with and apply AI tools to improve the quality and efficiency of venture-building work.
Build strong, trusted relationships with founders and senior leadership teams.
Lead Sprint 0 and diagnostic processes to understand each company's business model, growth trajectory, operational constraints, worker experience, and opportunities for scale.
Translate company challenges into clearly defined venture-building scopes with measurable objectives, deliverables, timelines, and outcomes.
Develop clear hypotheses linking proposed interventions to company growth and increased work opportunities for financially disadvantaged youth.
Support portfolio companies to become stronger, more scalable businesses capable of sustainably creating work for financially disadvantaged youth.
Lead each venture-building engagement autonomously from beginning to end.
Provide strategic guidance to founders on business model evolution, growth strategy, product development, operations, fundraising, partnerships, and long-term growth pathways.
Coordinate any relevant BFA specialists and external experts required to deliver engagements.
Provide hands-on specialist support where appropriate rather than relying solely on external resources.
Manage all engagements within agreed budgets and timelines while maintaining a high standard of founder experience.
Identify risks or underperformance early and work with the Head of Venture Building and founders to make appropriate course corrections.
Bring a strong experimentation and product mindset to each engagement.
Document what was tested, what worked, what failed, and what should be scaled or discontinued.
Drive Business Growth & Transition-to-Work Outcomes (10%)
Help our portfolio companies translate commercial growth into increased access to work and income opportunities for DAWN participants.
Understand the commercial drivers behind each platform's ability to create work, including customer demand, worker supply, unit economics, pricing, retention, geographic expansion, and operational capacity.
Work with founders to identify and remove bottlenecks preventing them from onboarding and activating more workers.
Develop strategies that improve worker acquisition, activation, utilization, productivity, retention, and earnings.
Ensure particular attention is given to the barriers affecting young women, refugees and displaced people, persons with disabilities, and other underserved groups.
Analyze company and worker-level data to understand what is driving or limiting work outcomes.
Help platforms establish commercially sustainable approaches to inclusion rather than relying solely on program-funded interventions.
Work with platforms to define realistic pathways from participant onboarding to verified work and income.
Track whether venture-building interventions are generating the intended business and transition-to-work outcomes.
Ecosystem & Partnership Engagement (10%)
Build relationships that strengthen both individual portfolio companies and the wider jobtech ecosystem.
Develop relationships with investors, corporates, technology partners, funders, industry experts, accelerators, and ecosystem organizations.
Identify partnership opportunities that can accelerate portfolio company growth.
Facilitate introductions between founders and potential investors, customers, partners, and experts.
Identify investors whose theses align with DAWN portfolio companies.
Gather recommendations from investors and ecosystem partners on promising companies and emerging market opportunities.
Represent BFA Global and DAWN at relevant conferences, industry events, roundtables, and ecosystem forums.
Advocate for commercially sustainable approaches to inclusive job creation and platform-based work.
Learning, Insights & Venture-Building Methodology (10%)
Ensure lessons from individual engagements strengthen BFA's wider approach to venture building and DAWN's learning agenda.
Harvest insights systematically from venture-building engagements and experiments.
Identify recurring patterns across business models, sectors, worker pathways, and growth challenges.
Document case studies, practical tools, playbooks, and lessons from engagements.
Contribute to blogs, reports, learning products, and other thought-leadership outputs.
Translate company-level experiences into practical insights that can inform DAWN's future platform strategy.
Work with the Head of Venture Building and Jobtech Alliance research and learning teams to identify what interventions are most effective in driving business and work outcomes.
Qualifications & Experience
The ideal candidate will bring:
7+ years of relevant professional experience, including significant experience in venture building, startups, accelerators, management consulting, venture capital, product management, innovation, or a fast-growing technology company.
Demonstrated experience working directly with startup founders and senior leadership teams to solve complex business and growth challenges.
Strong experience supporting startups in Nigeria or other emerging markets.
Demonstrated experience taking companies or products through experimentation, validation, growth, or scale.
Strong understanding of startup business models, unit economics, growth strategy, product development, operations, and fundraising.
Experience designing and executing MVPs, pilots, experiments, and go-to-market strategies.
Expertise in lean product management, including design sprints, value proposition design, hypothesis-driven experimentation, customer discovery, and roadmap prioritization.
Strong quantitative and analytical capability, including the ability to conduct deep dives into company and customer data and translate findings into action.
Experience supporting companies to raise capital or direct experience in startup investing would be advantageous.
Strong networks across the startup, investor, technology, or innovation ecosystem.
Experience mentoring founders, Venture Builders, analysts, or other junior team members.
Strong project management and execution capability, with the ability to manage several complex engagements simultaneously.
Excellent communication, facilitation, relationship-building, and stakeholder-management skills.
Ability to work effectively in a fast-moving, entrepreneurial, highly collaborative, and geographically distributed environment.
Demonstrated experience in jobtech, marketplaces, digital platforms, future of work, fintech, e-commerce, or other technology-enabled business models is highly desirable.
Education
Bachelor's degree in Business, Finance, Economics, Engineering, Technology, Entrepreneurship, or a related field.
An MBA, Master's degree, or other relevant advanced qualification is an advantage, but equivalent practical startup and venture-building experience will be strongly considered.
Anticipated Start Date: January 2027
Location: Nigeria
This is a fixed-term contract starting January 2027 to December 2029Candidates must have local work permits. Compensation will be commensurate with experience.
Only shortlisted candidates who provide the required information will be contacted for follow-up.
At BFA, we are committed to providing an environment of mutual respect where equal employment opportunities are available to all applicants and teammates without regard to race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy (including childbirth, lactation, and related medical conditions), national origin, age, physical and mental disability, marital status, sexual orientation, military, and veteran status, and any other characteristic protected by applicable law.
BFA believes that diversity and inclusion among our teammates are critical to our success as a global company. We seek to recruit, develop and retain the most talented people from a diverse candidate pool and to carry out the best inclusion work we undertake.
*BFA will not sponsor work permits.
**BFA will not pay for relocation expenses.
Originally posted on Himalayas