Head of Engagement & Retention

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At Bondora, our mission is simple: to make finance easy, transparent, and accessible for everyone. Founded in 2008, we've helped more than 700,000 customers across Europe borrow and invest effortlessly through our trusted digital products. As a rapidly growing financial technology company, we're reaching new heights with a bold vision. We're set to acquire a banking license, unlocking a world of possibilities for our customers. This transition will allow us to expand our lending across more EU countries and broaden our product suite to deliver even more value. Join us on this journey and let's build the future of finance together! What is this role about? As Head of Engagement & Retention at Bondora, reporting directly to the CMO, you will own how we activate, convert, and grow value from our 1.4M+ existing customer base across 7+ markets. Your primary mandate is to grow Active Customers and Active Balance per Customer, the two outcomes that drive our portfolio expansion from ~€0.69B today to a targeted ~€2.6B by 2029. We are choosing not to do this through generic campaigns. We are building a customer-level orchestration system - a commercial layer that sits between Bondora's credit engine and the customer - that decides, for every eligible user at every relevant moment, what to offer, through which channel, at what time, with what framing. You will own the operating, scaling, and refinement of this system, and you will be the partner who turns it into measurable commercial output at the customer level. Your main responsibilities will be: Own Active Customers and Active Balance per Customer: deliver against ambitious targets for both metrics, using lifecycle, reactivation, repeat-loan, refinancing, and add-on initiatives as the levers under your direct control. Orchestrate Bondora's customer-level engagement system: operate and continuously refine the decision-driven engagement loop (data → decision → orchestration → delivery → outcome → data) across owned digital surfaces, direct messaging channels, paid media audience syncs, and support surfaces. Operate and harden Braze as the orchestration backbone : take the platform from late implementation into a production-grade, segmentation-driven operating system; own flows, governance, and execution standards. Drive the decision engine forward: partner with Product, Engineering, and Analytics on the build-vs-buy decision, the data foundation, and the operationalization of next-best-action logic into Braze and beyond. Build and govern the content library: ensure assets are modular, personalizable, and localizable through configuration rather than duplication, so that orchestration can scale without proportional production cost. Lead and develop the team: manage a team of three with clear ownership and accountability, while remaining hands-on yourself. Drive cross-functional partnership: work closely with acquisition, product, analytics, engineering, legal, risk, and country managers. Drive prioritization conversations toward decisions. Analyze, learn, iterate : track and report on Active Customers, Active Balance per Customer, returning applications, ROAS on retention activities, channel conversion, fatigue, and campaign performance. Feed insights back into model retraining, rules tuning, and channel optimization. Who this role is for: This role is designed for a senior builder/operator who has experience scaling retention functions in early-stage or scale-up environments with roughly 100-300 people. If the conditions below energize you, you'll likely thrive in the role. You have built or substantially rebuilt a retention function from the ground up, under constraints, with limited resources. You default to execution and scrappy problem-solving rather than waiting for perfect infrastructure. You are comfortable making decisions with incomplete information and owning outcomes when dependencies you don't control don't come through. You push for what you need, but you also find a way when you don't get it - without losing the plot. You see ambiguity and missing structure as interesting problems, not red flags. What would ensure success in this role? Master's degree in Economics, Data Science, Statistics, Marketing, or a related field. 10+ years of hands-on experience in lifecycle, CRM, and retention marketing, with a proven track record of driving returning customer strategy, loyalty, and lifetime value, ideally in financial services, banking, fintech, or recurring revenue models. At least 5 years of experience leading and managing a team. Deep expertise in direct marketing channels (email, SMS, WhatsApp), including segmentation, automation, and performance optimization. Understanding of performance marketing fundamentals (paid search, display retargeting) and experience collaborating with acquisition teams on cross-channel retention strategies. Highly hands-on, organized, and structured, with strong project management skills and the a

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