Director of Operational Excellence

Location: Flexible - in one of our main offices

About the opportunity

As Director of Operational Excellence, you will lead the design, training, control, and scaling of our core operational processes across all areas of customer operations to ensure quality, compliance, automation, and efficiency across the business, and optimize a great customer experience. 

You will lead a team of 60+ professionals across process and expertise development, Quality Assurance, Operations Learning & Development, and Change Management & Control. With process and expertise development embedded within key operational areas, the function plays a critical role in ensuring process accuracy, regulatory compliance and strong functional capabilities across the business. 

Reporting directly to the Co-Founder and COO, you will be responsible for owning the operational process framework, enabling effective training, ensuring strong controls, and building an operational reporting and analytics function to meet business needs. 

In this role, you will

• Define and lead the Operational Excellence strategy across five critical functions, driving continuous improvement and operational readiness across all operational service lines.

• Establish a strong partnership with the COO and Director of Operations to jointly shape and deliver the long-term vision and strategic roadmap of operations.

• Build and lead a high-performing organization of 60+ professionals, empowering them to deliver high-quality support and operational excellence across all customer touchpoints.

• Own the core operational capabilities, ensuring processes, tools, and training are designed for scale and efficiency. 

• Build and scale a centralized reporting and analytics function, delivering timely, accurate, and actionable insights across operational teams, with a focus on regulatory reporting, performance KPIs, and operational health metrics. 

• Drive process and expertise development across operational domains, ensuring specialist capabilities are embedded and continuously developed. 

• Evolve the Change Management & Control function, overseeing governance, project implementation readiness, and risk mitigation strategies to support a stable operating environment.

• Oversee Quality Assurance, maintaining rigorous process controls and performance monitoring to uphold the highest standards of service and compliance.

• Lead the Learning & Development agenda by delivering a cohesive training strategy that supports onboarding, upskilling, and continuous learning for all levels — ensuring ‌all teams are equipped to perform at their best in a dynamic environment.

• Act as a strategic partner across business units, aligning operational excellence goals with business priorities and regulatory requirements.

• Contribute to ‌operational automation strategy, ensuring tools and technology support scalable and efficient execution across functions.

• Foster a culture of accountability, collaboration, and continuous improvement - empowering your teams to innovate and raise the bar on operational delivery.
   

What you need to be successful

Background:

• Extensive experience (10+ years) in leading operations or transformation programs in banking, financial services, or similarly regulated industries and/ or in a fast-scaling startup.

• Proven leadership experience managing multi-functional global teams, ideally with oversight of L&D, QA, SMEs, and/or Change Management.

• Experience in designing and implementing transformation strategies, from process design to change execution.

• Experience in building and scaling operational reporting and analytics functions, aligning reporting outputs with risk, compliance, and performance requirements.

• Proven experience in process automation, with a project management mindset and a focus on scalable solutions.

• Experience managing outsourced partnerships and driving performance through third-party providers.
   

Skills:

• Deep understanding of operational frameworks, controls, and scalable service design in a fast-paced and regulated environment. 

• Demonstrated ability to lead through influence, manage complexity, and partner with executive-level stakeholders.

• Strong analytical and decision-making skills, with the ability to interpret data to drive operational strategy and performance improvements. 

• Outstanding communication and collaboration skills with fluency in English; additional languages are a plus.

• Comfortable identifying opportunities to apply AI or emerging technologies to improve processes.

• A customer-first mindset with a passion for operational excellence and continuous learning.

What’s in it for you:

• Accelerate your career growth by joining one of Europe’s most talked about disruptors 🚀.
• Employee benefits that range from a competitive personal development budget, work from home budget, discounts to fitness & wellness memberships, language apps and public transportation. 
  
  
• As an N26 employee you will have access to a Premium subscription on your personal N26 bank account. As well as subscriptions for friends and family members.    
  
  
• Additional day of annual leave for each year of service.  
  
  
• A high degree of autonomy and access to cutting edge technologies — all while working with a friendly team of peers of diverse nationalities, life experiences and family statuses. 
  
  
• A relocation package with visa support for those who need it.

Who we are

N26 has reimagined banking for today’s digital world. Technology and design empower everything we do and it’s how we are building the global banking platform the world loves to use.

We've eliminated physical branches, paperwork, and hidden fees for an elegant digital experience and supreme savings. Giving people the power to live and bank their way is what gets us out of bed in the morning and inspires the work that we do. 

We are headquartered in Berlin with offices in multiple cities across Europe, including Vienna and Barcelona, and a 1,500-strong team of more than 80 nationalities.

Sounds good? Apply now for this position.

Equal Opportunities:

We recognize that our strength lies in our people and the varied perspectives they bring to our workforce. We strive to build talented and diverse teams to drive our business success and empower our people to reach their full potential.

We genuinely welcome and encourage applications from people of all backgrounds, cultures, genders, sexual orientations, abilities, neurodiversities, and ages. We're committed to creating an inclusive workspace where everyone feels valued and respected, free from harassment and discrimination. If there's anything you need to make the application process work for you, please let us know by reaching out to candidate.exp@n26.com. 

Visit our website to learn more about Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion at N26.