Central Expansion Lead

The Role

As our Central Expansion Lead, you own how Gigs enters new markets, end to end, across every country we launch. You're not running a single market; you're the central operator who ensures new markets launch in parallel, on time, and to the same high standard.

You own the playbook and central orchestration: how we approach a new country, what Gigs needs to win there, the competitive landscape, entity setup, and the operational runbooks that turn a green-field market into a live, compliant business. Our Founding Operators run launches on the ground (roughly 50% connectivity, 50% in-market ops) and report into Connectivity—your job is to make their launches faster, smarter, and synchronized, feeding what you learn back into our product.

You're building the central expansion function from scratch, the playbook, the process, the institutional memory. The headcount is deliberately lean centrally; the real investment is the Founding Operators and local teams you make faster.

What You Will Do

• Playbook ownership: You build and iterate the market-entry playbook from scoping templates, competitive and regulatory analysis, the runbooks that take a market from green-field to live and scale. Every launch makes the next one faster.
• Portfolio & timeline management: You hold the master cross-market timeline and cadence. You sequence workstreams across regulatory, supply, legal, and hiring — surfacing risks before they become delays and keeping every market executing in lockstep,
• Regulatory & legal orchestration: You own the cross-market compliance playbook: scoping required authorisations, licenses, regulatory landscape, entity and insurance setup, data compliance, and the carrier dependencies that gate a launch.
• Cross-functional and local team enablement: Multiple central and local teams need to be enabled and coordinated. You make them faster, unblock them, and hold every market to the same bar, from hiring kickoff through to scale.
• Product feedback loop: You translate what each launch surfaces into inputs for our product and platform. This is the function that bridges field reality with platform priorities and what makes this role more than a traditional expansion role.

What We Are Looking For

• A real track record of launching markets at pace: you've stood up 2**+ markets** end-to-end (in parallel or back-to-back), ideally including at least one where regulatory authorization or entity formation was a primary gate
• 5+ years in market expansion, operations, or consulting at a company actively scaling into multiple new markets simultaneously. Fintech, payments, or B2B tech platform strongly preferred; another regulated vertical where you had to earn the right to operate also works
• Structured and relentless as a program driver: you hold many parallel workstreams (regulatory, technical, commercial, people) across several markets at once without losing the thread, and you have a methodology, not just a tolerance for complexity
• Analytically sharp and decisive: you make sound calls with incomplete information, document your reasoning, and adjust fast when you're wrong.
• Comfortable being both the strategist and the person doing the work. You'll draft the playbook in the morning and unblock a Founding Operator on a regulatory question in the afternoon, without a team to hand either off to.
• Commercial judgment on market entry, not just market execution: you can assess feasibility, sequencing, and ROI and bring a recommendation to the executive team, not just a plan.
• Strong stakeholder management across internal and external counterparties: you can align Connectivity, local operators, legal, finance, and product around one timeline, and you've navigated external parties (regulators, carriers, or infrastructure partners) where the relationship itself was a launch dependency.
• You've built something from scratch, a process, a function, a playbook that didn't exist before. You're comfortable with the blank page.