Chief Technical Officer at FrontlineSMS

THE THINGS YOU’LL DO

Technical Leadership

You will ensure Frontline continues to provide the best-in-class messaging management and automation tooling, by designing, prioritising, implementing and maintaining features across our product suite. You will take input on product design and prioritisation from the company’s other functions, and sole responsibility for product security, scalability and high availability.

Lead our dev team in their day-to-day work using our Agile tools and methods, including Kanban, daily standups and retrospectives, Jira, Trello, GitHub and Slack, amongst others
Act as our senior-most developer in building our FrontlineSMS platform using the Groovy & the Grails framework, and our complementary FrontlineSync Android app
Ensure FrontlineSMS satisfies the requirements of all SaaS platforms, with focus on scalability, high availability and security, by maintaining and improving our AWS-based cloud hosting infrastructure
Lead in our DevOps efforts: maintaining and improving our continuous integration and delivery approaches and AWS infrastructure
Recruit, hire, mentor and manage all members of the Frontline dev team
Oversee the quality of scoping discussions, implementation and testing within the dev team, to ensure our ambitious, iterative platform improvements result in as few bugs as possible, high-quality and up-to-date documentation, and eliminates other forms of technical debt such as inflexible code architecture or poor scalability

Product Development

As the CTO, you will ensure that we are prioritising the correct features, and that feedback from our users results in continuous improvement of out platform’s capabilities and usability.

• Take input from the CEO, COO and other roles to ensure our product and roadmap are focused on the most relevant needs of our users
• Through estimation, measurement of delivery and detailed reporting, provide a predictable momentum of implementation work, allowing for scheduling of client-funded work around our team deadlines
• Ensure the design and implementation of all user-facing functionality upholds a high standard of consistency, accessibility and ease-of-use
• Work with the COO to provide responsive and thoughtful technical support to our users, and ensure the feedback from our users is an input into product roadmap prioritisation
• Maintain excellent user- and developer-facing documentation, ensuing a culture of continuous documentation improvement is upheld within the developer and user support teams

Senior Company Management

Our Nairobi office is where most of our staff work, and you’ll be the most senior voice in the room. You will be part of our senior management team discussing and inputting into a wide variety of company areas including strategy and planning.

Work with the CEO and COO to deliver the operational requirements of our Nairobi office, ensuring we provide a productive, comfortable and inclusive environment for all our staff
Maintain the Frontline company culture of adaptability, experimentation, common goals and integration between our business units, and inclusivity, both within the Nairobi office and our larger international team

QUALIFICATIONS (OUR WISH LIST)

• Experience leading dev team(s) in some sort of Agile software development environment; we are aware that there are many good agile setups and prefer someone with strong practical knowledge or opinion in effectively using Scrum or Kanban
• Experience acting as a line manager and mentor of developers
• A strong coding background, with grounding in statically/optionally-typed, object-oriented programming
• Java or other JVM language experience is a major bonus (extra bonus points for already knowing Groovy/Grails)
• Good eye for design, paired with strong implementation skills. Good knowledge of modern Javascript frameworks and killer CSS skills
• Strong knowledge and past experience in building zero-downtime, high-availability, scalable and easily maintainable web services
• Experience deploying and maintaining software on cloud hosting services, with particular focus on Amazon Web Services’ Beanstalk (EC2 + ELB + RDS), S3, CloudWatch and related services