Strategy & Operations Lead (m/w/d)

About Us

YouLend is a rapidly growing FinTech that is the preferred embedded financing platform for many of the world’s leading e-commerce platforms, tech companies, and Payment Service Providers. Our software platform enables our partners to extend their value proposition by offering flexible financing products in their own branding, to their merchant base, without capital at risk.

We are owned by the leading Private Equity company, EQT, and have grown +100% year-on-year since 2020. We are headquartered in London, UK, but are also present in several European countries as well as the United States where we service our partners, including eBay, Amazon, Just Eat, Shopify, and Stripe.

Our headquarters are based in London, and we have just opened our newest office in Berlin to accelerate our growth in Europe. By 2027, YouLend expects the total fundings in this region to more than double through new and existing partners. As a result, we are looking for exceptionally talented and self-motivated individuals who want to build a career within the fastest growing area of the company.

The Role

We are looking for a sharp, execution-focused 'Strategy & Operations Lead' to own and improve the way we deliver financing to SMEs. You will join YouLend’s Berlin office, supporting our continued growth in Europe (80+ people expected across Sales, Customer Service and Credit Operations in 8 different countries). In this role, you will play a key role in strengthening operational excellence, improving business intelligence, and driving scalable growth through data. You will own high-impact initiatives whilst managing a team of 1-2 Analysts.

You will work on some of the most important and ambiguous problems facing Europe - from incorporating AI into our decisioning engines, enhancing our communication strategy and building new processes to developing new KPIs, monitoring business performance and improving funnel conversion. This is a highly analytical and hands-on role. We are looking for someone who is comfortable moving between analysing data, developing a strategy, testing solutions and working with stakeholders to put them into practice with a “get it done” mindset. You will work across departments to identify bottlenecks, design experiments, drive strategic growth initiatives, and champion operational innovation. You are encouraged to think big and tackle new problems everyday.

Example Problems:

• The business has decided to expand to a new market. How do you open and scale a new country?
• Why are certain salespeople, partners, products or customer segments outperforming others, and how can we replicate that performance?
• How do we remove friction from the merchant journey and reduce pushbacks in the funnel?
• How can we use AI to improve conversion rates and automate part of the decisioning engine?

Key Responsibilities

• Take full ownership of driving operational excellence across European operations, with performance measured through conversion, efficiency, quality, and profit.
• Drive conversion optimisation by piloting initiatives, running A/B experiments, iterating on funnel logic, and influencing how we balance risk, speed, and customer experience.
• Define and track core operational KPIs and translate insights into clear action plans that deliver measurable improvements.
• Identify automation and tooling opportunities to reduce manual effort, improve compliance, and support rapid growth — all while maintaining quality standards.
• Collaborate with Product, Credit, Risk, Compliance, Tech, and Production Line teams to develop or fix processes, and test new approaches to scale operations more efficiently.
• Act as a change leader, implementing and embedding improvements quickly and effectively across teams with minimal disruption and strong adoption rates.
• Help take new products, partners, and markets from zero to one.
• Act with urgency and ownership, prioritising high-impact opportunities and ensuring progress is made fast and visibly.
• Act as an on-the-ground operational support function and sparring partner to HoDs, Team Leaders, and Managers.

Skills, Knowledge & Expertise

• 2+ years of experience in consulting, banking, FinTech, payments, or highly analytical business roles.
• Exceptional communication skills — both written and verbal — with the ability to influence stakeholders and drive change across teams.
• A natural change agent who can navigate ambiguity, lead cross-functional implementations, and manage operational transformation with minimal oversight.
• Highly analytical and data-driven; comfortable using SQL, Excel, or equivalent to turn data into strategy.
• You’re hands-on, proactive, and act with urgency — you push projects forward, remove blockers, and get things done. You can easily navigate short-term & long-term trade-offs.
• Passionate about process design, optimisation, and using technology to solve operational challenges.
• Fluent in German is a plus.