Head of Strategic Partnerships (f/m/x) na lemon.markets

About lemon.markets 🍋

We enable anyone to be an investor. Our mission is to grow investing opportunities for all European customers and businesses, providing seamless access to capital markets. By empowering FinTechs, Banks and Wealth Managers to offer investment products, we help create financial well-being for their customers.

lemon.markets provides a Brokerage-as-a-Service platform for simple digital access to capital markets through a single API. Our API-first infrastructure makes launching an investment product customer-centric and compliant. We abstract all complexity for our partners through a well documented API, a self-service customer operations portal and operating in a clear regulatory framework. Enabling partners to launch in weeks, not months.

We have experienced first hand that brokerage infrastructure is broken. Building an investment product used to be highly expensive, challenging and cumbersome. We ease this pain by shielding our partners & their customers from the underlying complexity - and with that, we make investing seamlessly accessible to everyone. Because that’s exactly what we enjoy, going to places nobody else dares and solving hard problems. This not only creates tons of value when done right, but attracts the smartest minds - because outlier companies are built by exceptional people like you.

Your Mission:

You will be the crucial link between lemon.markets and our strategic partners, from first conversations through launch and long-term growth. As Head of Strategic Partnerships, you’ll define how our platform and business expand in Europe: prioritising the right opportunities and turning strategy into measurable outcomes. Reporting directly to our VP Brokerage, you’ll operate with high ownership, working closely with GTM, Product, Engineering, Operations and Outsourcing to set partnerships up for success from day one.

You’ll oversee complex, cross-functional development programs, manage executive-level relationships, and build the frameworks that make launching and operating investment products with lemon.markets customer-centric, regulator-ready and straightforward. This is your opportunity to shape our strategic relationships in motion end to end, delivering today while laying the foundations to scale.

You will:

• Partner with the sales team to actively market our offering and driving business development by identifying and closing new opportunities.

• Define and execute the functional concepts for new offerings and specify the required features, understand key dependencies, and ensure a seamless experience for our customers.

• Be responsible for the strategic management and development of key industry relationships, including with custodians, exchanges, asset managers, and other relevant players.

• Lead critical strategic projects and programs, managing dependencies and connecting the dots across domains and functions.

• Serve as the crucial link between lemon.markets and our new parent company dwpbank, building strong relationships and managing dependencies across all relevant domains and functions within both companies to ensure alignment and shared success.

• Bring rapid clarity to ambiguous situations, resolve them effectively, and communicate decisions efficiently to enable teams to implement solutions.

You will be successful in this role if:

• Growing investing opportunities excites you. You have a deep understanding of market infrastructure, regulation, and the moving parts of custody, clearing, and settlement—and you’ve built a proven track record across the German and broader European landscape.

• You’ve led and landed complex, cross-functional projects. You’ve managed strategic relationships across legal, product, operations, risk, and commercial teams, and you know how to turn ambiguity into clear workstreams, measurable outcomes, and durable wins.

• You have a product mindset. You contribute to strategy, shape roadmaps with grounded input, and ensure initiatives ladder up to business goals, balancing speed, risk, and customer impact.

• You connect the dots instinctively. You map and manage dependencies across domains and companies, spotting risks early, shaping mitigations, and keeping cross-org initiatives unblocked.

• You’re a natural relationship builder. You earn trust quickly, navigate tough conversations with clarity, and make execution feel simple for everyone involved including the executive level stakeholders.

• You thrive in cross-functional settings. You align diverse teams around shared goals and bring a customer-first mindset, grounded in a deep understanding of the full value chain from trading to settlement to asset servicing.

• You are ready to dive in into complex topics. You’re pragmatic, hands-on, and comfortable rolling up your sleeves in a dynamic environment where priorities evolve.

• You care about compliance by design. You’ve seen robust controls and understand how to build scalable, regulator-ready processes into partnerships from day one.

• You thrive on ownership. You proactively drive initiatives end to end, remove blockers, and raise the bar without waiting to be asked.

• You are fluent in both German and English. You can comfortably can switch contexts and interact with stakeholders seamlessly across markets and functions.

How we take care of you:

🚀 Competitive compensation package:

We offer you a competitive salary and benefits package, based on your experience and the value-add you bring to lemon.markets.

💎 Make a real impact:

Shape the experience for our Partners and us alike. Decide on tools, processes and our go-to-market while building, learning and growing together.

🕑 Flexible working hours:

We value focus time. Encouraging everyone to minimise fixed meetings and leverage asynchronous communication.

💻 Build your perfect setup:

Mac, Mechanical Keyboard, Screen. These are not expenses but investments. Please tell us what is needed to make you productive, and we will take care of it.

🏢 On-site first, but remote flexible:

We all believe that in - person collaboration is an integral part of working together, but offer flexibility for working from home. Twice a year the whole team meets for our off-site to honour this belief.

📈 Grow with us:

We take your personal development seriously, meaning that we make sure to constantly mentor and challenge you so that you can reach your next level and beyond.

👶🏽 Get the flexibility you need:

Whether you have a family or a passion that you want to follow on the side. We want to offer you a setting that fits your current stage in life.

As an equal opportunity employer, lemon.markets is committed to building an inclusive workplace. The company welcomes people from all different backgrounds, including age, citizenship, ethnic and racial origins, gender identities, individuals with disabilities, marital status, religions and ideologies, and sexual orientations to apply.

About the process

Hiring can be an exhausting process, especially when you're the one trying to get hired. Therefore, we try to make this a fast and transparent process. Additionally, you will always have one contact person guiding you through the process and helping you to schedule meetings, and setting you up on a path of success. Your process will look like this:

1. Get to know - Melissa - Talent | 40 minutes

2. Deep Dive - Laura - VP of Brokerages | 60 minutes

3. Meet the Leadership - Markus - Managing Director | 60 minutes

4. Meet us at our lemon.markets HQ

   1. Case study - Laura - VP Brokerage, Isaac - Head of Product, Sam - VP Engineering | 60 minutes

   2. Principles Session - A selection of lemoneers | 60 minutes