Agile Operations Lead, Lelapa AI

About Us

Lelapa AI is building a localised African AI lab and pioneering language technologies designed for Africans, by Africans—pushing the boundaries of AI research, product development, and technological innovation. As a fast-growing, high-impact AI startup, our distributed team across Africa, Europe, and North America is shaping the future of AI on the continent. The coming wave of African AI talent needs a home to continue their work: to do their best research, and to convert the results into products that improve African lives. Lelapa AI will be that home.

About The Role

We are hiring an Agile Operations Lead to drive execution across the business. This role is

essential to ensuring that Lelapa delivers high-quality products, integrates well with

commercial clients, and maintains operational excellence across teams. The Agile Operations

Lead will play a hybrid role that combines project delivery, agile implementation, and

cross-functional operations management.

The Ideal Candidate Is

• A delivery-first operator who brings structure and speed to ambiguous projects.
• An agile coach with excellent people skills and process discipline.
• A highly organised executor who collaborates across commercial, product and technical teams.
• Comfortable translating abstract, complex work into defined plans and actions.
  
  

Reporting to the Chief Operating Officer (COO), this person will work closely with all teams across the company, ensuring that Agile principles and operational excellence are embedded into Lelapa AI’s culture. While this role is primarily internally focused, there will be exposure to client projects and fundraising efforts, requiring the ability to context-switch effectively and operate at multiple levels of the organisation.

This is a hands-on, high-ownership role, ideal for someone who has experience in startups, consulting, agile transformation, or high-performance operations teams.

Responsibilities

Project delivery and execution

• Lead and own the delivery of cross-functional projects across research, engineering, product and commercial.
• Planning and managing multiple projects simultaneously, balancing delivery timelines, dependencies and stakeholder expectations.
• Drive clarity, structure and accountability across all workstreams.
• Translate abstract or exploratory initiatives into clear, actionable delivery plans.
• Facilitate cross-functional sprint planning, grooming and retrospectives with a strong focus on output and outcomes.
• Track and manage scope, risks, dependencies and resource allocation.
• Maintain tight timelines and delivery commitments across all teams.
• Maintain clear visibility of progress and status through Linear and regular reporting.
  
  

Agile implementation and coaching

• Establish agile rhythms, backlogs, rituals and sprints across the organisation.
• Serve as Scrum Master for engineering and research teams, and support agile practices company-wide.
• Build a company-wide delivery system that functions even without your direct involvement.
• Support teams to iterate effectively, learn fast, and deliver value continuously.
• Coach teams on Agile best practices, improve velocity, and embed structured workflows across projects.
• Foster a product-led mindset, ensuring features are regularly demo’d and tested with customers or potential users.
• Driving cross-functional collaboration, ensuring alignment between Product, Engineering, Commercial, Operations and Back Office teams.
  
  

Operational systems & process optimisation

• Map end-to-end workflows across commercial, product development, QA, deployment and post-deployment support.
• Design and implement improvements to increase throughput, reduce blockers and enhance coordination.
• Build documentation, templates and tools to support execution velocity.
• Promote automation and AI tooling to eliminate repetitive manual work.
• Implement project management tools and best practices
• Create documentation and standard operating procedures
• Drive continuous process improvement initiatives
  
  

Execution culture and performance management

• Create visibility into delivery velocity, cycle times and throughput.
• Hold teams accountable to delivery goals, while nurturing a collaborative and psychologically safe environment.
• Champion a culture of execution, experimentation and learning.
  
  

Strategic support

• Support key strategic efforts, including select client projects and fundraising-related operational needs.
• Ensure operational processes align with the company’s values-driven, high-output, and product-led culture.
  
  

Requirements

• Bachelors degree in Business Administration, Computer Science or related.
• Experience working in product-led, API-focused, or SaaS organisations.
• 3-5 years of agile project management experience and operational delivery.
• Strong understanding of Agile frameworks (Scrum, Kanban) and modern PM tools.
• Certification in Agile/Scrum methodologies.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to manage stakeholders at all levels.
• Strong ability to influence, facilitate and collaborate effectively at all levels: managing up to executives, horizontally across cross-functional teams, and downward to direct reports.
• Strong problem-solving and decision-making skills.
• Highly organised, adaptable and able to operate in high-ambiguity settings.
• Nice-to-have: familiarity with tools like Linear, Notion, GitHub, or similar.
  
  

Benefits

• A dynamic, diverse, innovative, and inclusive work environment.
• Opportunities for personal and professional development.
• Medical aid contribution
• Substantial parental leave.
• A chance to shape the future of AI in Africa and make a meaningful impact in a pioneering sector.
• 25 days of vacation leave
• R50,000 - R65,000 per month depending on experience