Senior Full-Stack Software Engineer at FarmDrive

Role Overview

Do you have a knack for solving problems? Do you love to build from scratch and see your work translate into products that are impacting millions? Does working on mission critical applications alongside talented and open-minded teammates excite you? Then this role is for you.

We are changing how smallholder farmers across Africa access financial services and at the core of this is the technology infrastructure we are building. Data collection tools, financial systems, credit risk assessment tools, communications systems, SMS/USSD/Android apps, robust and secure web services for financial institutions and other lenders to integrate to; are some of the systems we are building at FarmDrive. Our engineers are involved in all parts of the product life-cycle: idea generation, human- centered design, prototyping, planning, execution, testing and shipping. Our work starts with brainstorming to discover, explore, and understand our customer’s greatest challenges. Then we code. A lot. Finally, we ship and continuously iterate on products that have a direct impact on the world’s hardest problems.

Responsibilities

• Building new tech products that work seamlessly at the intersection of finance, agriculture and technology. The products we build must handle messy structured and unstructured data at enormous scales, all while maintaining an intuitive user experience and a wide range of analytics capabilities.
• You will be responsible for taking work from idea to deployment - from requirements through to delivery.
• Building and maintaining our data infrastructure including; database management, data backup, replication and recovery.
• Actively participate in and contribute to infrastructure, architectural and technical stack choices that will support high growth and scale.
• Working directly with telcos, financial institutions and other data providers means there is a lot of systems integration both internal and externally. You will build web services(SOAP and REST) that ensure secure, scalable and seamless system integrations.
• You will work closely with our risk analysts and data scientists to translate the results of their data crunching into products for our users.
• We handle and share sensitive financial information that must be secured. You work will involve securing all tech infrastructure - servers, systems, network, web services and data.
• Developing mobile apps to be used by millions of farmers.
• Performing unit tests, UAT tests and quality assurance checks to ensure our software meets SLAs and the stringent requirements of a fintech product.
• Code reviews & refactoring.
• Be a second line of support for technical issues.
• Building a world class engineering team. This will include leading engineering teams, involvement in recruitment, mentoring and managing junior software engineers.
• Some technologies we use:
• Python - Flask, Java, Javascript, HTML5, Android
• PostgreSQL, ElasticSearch, Kibana
• Docker, Kubernetes
• Amazon Web Services(AWS), Digital Ocean
• Git

What we look for

• A degree in computer science or related field
• 5+ years of working on large commercial software, preferably in the financial space
• Understanding of basic financial and accounting concepts
• You are curious and eager to learn new technologies that cut across different domains.
• You are passionate about product craftsmanship and care about great design, not only in products and their visual presentation but in your code and technical architecture as well.
• Strong adherence to coding standards to ensure high quality, easily readable and maintainable code.
• You enjoy and appreciate collaboration with others – startup is a team sport. Everyone contributes to get the job done.
• You have managed engineering teams and are passionate about mentoring junior engineers.
• Highly entrepreneurial, take initiative and ownership
• You have a constant desire to grow and develop. You ask the right questions, you bring fresh ideas to the table.
• You are comfortable in a high-paced, rapidly iterating, ambiguous environment, and can respond to urgent requests.
• You solve problems.
• You have keen attention to details
• You have integrity, are reliable, efficient, trustworthy, self-driven and thirsty for new knowledge.
• You want to work on things that make an impact on the world
• Ultimately, what really matters is you are excited by the prospect of building new products to increase availability of capital to smallholder farmers across the globe.

Benefits

• Opportunity to impact lives as you solve one of the world’s hardest problems.
• Competitive Salary + discretionary performance based bonus.
• Market based stock incentives appropriate for the role and vesting over a 3-4-year period.
• Medical cover