Retail Development Manager

About Nile.ag

Nile's mission is to enhance the livelihoods of both farmers and consumers throughout Africa. By providing a digital ecosystem that streamlines trading and transactions, we help farmers improve their economic viability while ensuring food remains affordable for consumers. Our all-in-one application allows farmers to sell produce, access funds, and manage input procurement and financing.

We are a high-growth company backed by institutional investors, including Naspers and the Dutch Development Bank (FMO). Our founding team brings together experience from world-class organizations such as Amazon, J.P. Morgan, and Luno. Learn more about us at www.nile.ag/about

Our Team & Culture

We are committed to building a high-performing team that is passionate about fundamentally transforming Africa's food systems. Nile's work environment is fast-paced, modern, and fun, reflecting the nature of our high-growth business. We operate daily based on our core values, which form the foundation of all our decisions.

The role

At Nile, we view roles as opportunities for personal development; as our business evolves, so will your role. We are seeking a Retail Development Manager to drive the rollout and growth of our People's Market retail footprint, reporting directly to the Managing Director. This is a hands-on, on-the-ground role for someone who has physically opened and grown stores in commuter nodes, townships, and rural towns — and knows what makes them work.

The successful applicant will take ownership of the following:

• Site Identification and Feasibility: Finding, assessing and securing new retail sites in commuter nodes, township and rural catchments, including footfall and taxi-rank flow assessment, competitor scans, catchment income profiling and trading-density projections.
• Deal Making: Negotiating leases, landlord arrangements and municipal or informal-trading approvals, and building relationships with local stakeholders and community structures.
• Store Build and Opening: Managing the end-to-end new-store process — layout and space planning, shopfitting, refrigeration and cold chain, contractors, budgets, timelines and trading licences through to opening day.
• Operating Model and Playbook: Codifying what works into a repeatable rollout playbook so each store opens faster and cheaper than the last.

Requirements

• Retail Development Track Record (essential): Demonstrable experience developing and opening retail outlets in commuter nodes, townships or rural areas. You must be able to point to specific stores you helped bring to trade and speak to how they performed.
• Catchment Understanding: A strong feel for lower-to-middle income South African consumers and how price, pack size, range and cash-based shopping behaviour differ across these catchments.
• Project Delivery: Experience running store builds or similar capital projects to budget and deadline, coordinating contractors and multiple workstreams at once.
• Commercial Judgement: Comfortable building and defending a site business case, and able to read a store P&L and act on it.
• Operational Exposure: Familiarity with high-volume operational environments such as food retail, wholesale, warehousing or agrifood. Fresh produce experience is a strong advantage.
• Practicalities: Valid driver's licence and willingness to travel and spend significant time at site.
• Adaptability: An open-minded approach to embracing new ways of working, including the application of AI to drive efficiency.

Benefits

• Nile offers competitive remuneration, with opportunities to advance your career within a fast-growing company.
• We offer a vibrant work environment where you get to collaborate with highly motivative team members.