Software Engineer (Mid / Senior) (CH1018)

Our client is a tech start-up making life better for everyday households in Africa, looking for a Mid or Senior level Software Engineer at their offices in Cape Town, South Africa.

Your Mission

You will report directly to the team lead and work with him to understand key commercial problems and build new solutions for them. You will join existing projects creating smart solutions to quickly onboard key integrations with large telecommunications partners and government agencies. You will also lead juniors to grow the company’s cloud adoption with healthy sustainable practices, as they build or replace key systems to improve commercial outcomes, such as a new agent portal or new data pipelines for core credit analytics.

For any software engineer at the company, the mission is to:

• Understand the business’s primary commercial imperatives.
• Envision the technology that will support the commercial imperatives with feedback from the in-country operations teams and sales network.
• Design, build, test, maintain, and manage robust software solutions to enable the team to achieve their jobs and ultimately the company's objective to serve customers.

We are looking for a candidate with rigorous and structured thought, and the discipline to deliver exceptional tech projects, but with an interest in learning business and operational skills.

The juniors in the team are primarily composed of young computer scientists and engineers who combine a strong aptitude for software development with astute commercial thinking and the ability to lead teams of people to overcome operational challenges.

Basic Requirements

• 4 or more years of software engineering experience with commercially successful systems in fintech, payments, retail, credit, e-commerce.
• Recent experience in architecture and technical leadership of projects within these domains.
• Demonstrated expert knowledge and management of a mission-critical, 24x7 production system.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills to identify and troubleshoot system and integration challenges.
• Excellent leadership, communication, and collaboration skills to work effectively with technical and non-technical teams.
• Experience in cloud-based systems.
• Experience with Infrastructure-as-code, rapid and collaborative code pipelines, and other DevOps principles.

Preferred Requirements

• Experience with AWS serverless products and infrastructure as code, Terraform or CloudFormation.

Tech Stack of the Role:

• Frontend: Zoho for UI, database & Create, Read, Update & Delete (CRUD).
• Backend functions coded in Deluge, similar to Python.
• Cloud: AWS supporting 4 systems and growing fast.
• Events processing (SQS).
• Payment website & APIs integrating with MoMo Telecoms.
• Loan origination (Vue & Amplify).
• Smartphone integrations (APIs and step functions for locking, data access & Messaging).
• Plan to build more customer services: pay, support, buy, insure, lend, etc.

About the Company

We provide solar-powered electricity and smartphones at an affordable price to households across Malawi, Uganda, Rwanda, Zambia, and Madagascar. We operate through a network of agents and merchants to meet the challenges of last-mile distribution with technology, through our in-house developed platforms.

We take pride in building great technology and developing exceptional business models to deliver value to our Base of the Pyramid customers across the African continent. We see last-mile distribution as the major impediment to low-income customers in Africa accessing the technologies available to make their lives better and apply our focus to solving these challenges.

About Our Working Culture & Values

Our team is young and hardworking. We value downtime and flexibility, and we focus on outputs rather than hours in the office, but we also believe that we have a unique opportunity at the company and we work very hard to meet the high standards we set for ourselves.

We are low thrills and are careful custodians of money and resources. We love to travel to the countries we operate in and whenever we do, we make time to explore, but we do this, as with everything else, on a lean budget, cognizant of not diverting resources away from our customers and our mission.

We value resilience and self-reliance. Though we constantly organize ourselves to tackle problems in teams and ruthlessly support one another, we also believe that building independence and self-reliance in the face of challenges is an important part of growth.

We believe that long-term sustainability is a worthwhile goal. Whether in one’s personal life, from a business perspective, in relationships, or in the environment, we believe that prioritizing long-term benefits over short-term wins is a good strategy. As such, we aim for balance, and slow, steady, and disciplined progress in all that we do.

General:

• Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted. Should you not hear from us after 30 days you may consider your application unsuccessful.
• In keeping with our client’s employment equity requirements, only South African citizens will be considered.
• Please include your current salary and salary expectations.