VP People (f/m/x)

About lemon.markets 🍋

We enable anyone to be an investor. Our mission is to grow investing opportunities for all European customers and businesses. By empowering FinTechs, banks, and wealth managers to offer investment products, we help create financial well-being for their customers.

lemon.markets is a Brokerage-as-a-Service platform: simple digital access to capital markets through a single API. Our API-first infrastructure abstracts brokerage complexity with a well-documented API, a self-service customer operations portal, and a clear regulatory framework, so partners can launch customer-centric, compliant products in weeks, not months.

As part of the dwpbank Group, we share a clear goal: we enable anyone to be an investor by making investing in capital markets more accessible. By combining dwpbank’s long-standing expertise and stability with lemon.markets’ technology-first mindset and speed, we are building a modern, modular securities services ecosystem. Together, we offer faster time-to-market, modular services, and a modern customer experience that helps financial service providers stay competitive and respond more flexibly in a changing market

Your mission

As lemon.markets enters its next stage of growth, we are looking for a VP People to help strengthen the company from the inside out.

This role goes beyond leading People & Talent. You will help us move from a setup that is already functioning reasonably well into a more mature, scalable, and consistent organization. Working closely with our CEO, leadership team, and key stakeholders across lemon.markets and dwpbank, you will strengthen the People function, build stronger leadership structures and rituals, shape culture intentionally, and improve collaboration across both organizations.

Reporting directly to our CEO and being part of our extended executive board, you will own the People & Talent function, moderate key leadership forums, and help build the structures, principles, and rhythms that a more mature organization needs.

In this role you will:

• Own the People & Talent function end-to-end, lead the team, and continue to strengthen existing foundations across talent acquisition, compensation, performance, feedback, career development, and people policies
• Embed and scale the processes, standards, and initiatives already in place, ensuring they are consistently lived in the day-to-day reality of lemon.markets
• Build and evolve our leadership setup, including Leadership Principles, Leadership Development, and other leadership-related frameworks and processes
• Act as a strategic partner to our CEO and leadership team on people, leadership, and organizational effectiveness topics
• Moderate key leadership forums, especially the Executive Board and Senior Leadership Board, driving strong preparation, focus, follow-through, and accountability
• Own important company-wide rituals and cadences such as All Hands, planning cycles, offsites, and other leadership ceremonies
• Strengthen the collaboration and culture bridge between lemon.markets and dwpbank, improving how both our organizations work together in practice

You will be successful in this role if:

• You have extensive experience as a senior People leader in a regulated environment (ideally Fintech), have already seen and done this kind of role before and bring the maturity and judgment to help shape how lemon.markets leads, collaborates, and grows
• You are a broad People generalist with core expertise in HR Business Partnering and/or People Development, complemented by credible exposure across Talent Acquisition, People Operations, leadership support, and culture/performance topics.
• You bring hands-on experience with topics such as compensation models, performance frameworks, hiring processes, capacity planning, and budget planning
• You have experience leading organizations through cultural transformation and broader change management, ideally including mergers, acquisitions, or other high-change environments, and know how to guide people and leaders through uncertainty with clarity and pragmatism
• You see leadership as a privilege and a responsibility, act as a servant leader, and enjoy making the people around you better through feedback, mentoring, and active development
• You are highly structured, organized, and to the point, and know how to keep agendas, timing, preparation, and follow-through on track
• You bring strong executive presence and are comfortable representing the People function in leadership settings, facilitating focused discussions, holding senior stakeholders accountable, and pushing back when needed
• You bring an entrepreneurial mindset and focus on getting things done rather than only raising risks
• You are an exceptional communicator in German and English (C1+)

How we take care of you:

🕑 Flexible working hours

• We trust people to choose when they work best and avoid a rigid 9 to 5 mindset. You decide on the rhythm that helps you do your best work, with only shared core hours from 12:00 to 16:00 to support collaboration.
• 🏢 Hybrid work setup: You can work from anywhere in Germany within a hybrid model. At the same time, in-person collaboration is a key part of our culture. That being said, leadership lemoneers spend 7 days or more per month on-site in our Berlin office, spending quality time together with the team at events, onsites/offsites or over team dinners.
• 📈 Grow with us: We take your personal development seriously! You’ll get regular mentorship and stretch opportunities, a clear career development framework with frequent feedback conversations as well as an annual learning budget.
• 🌱 People & culture: You’ll feel our culture in the small things, like Polaroids from our lemoneers’ first day and our monthly new-joiner breakfasts. But also in the bigger things, like celebrating the onboarding of new partners or our annual offsites, where the whole company comes together to connect, reflect, and celebrate.