Chief Technology Officer (Portfolio Company) at Founders Factory Africa (FFA)

• You will be working in an autonomous, agile environment with a small team that values collaboration, learning, and sharing. By joining us, you would be joining a tight-knit team at a time when you can make a real impact on the direction of the company. Being a start-up the work is fast-paced and varied – you are flexible to change and motivated to deliver the best product possible.

Responsibilities:

• Guide team development efforts across backend, web and mobile applications in line with user requirements towards successful project delivery
• Provide technical leadership to teammates through coaching and mentorship
• Maintain high software quality standards within the team by establishing good practices and habits
• Collaborate with other software developers, business analysts and software architects to plan, design, develop, test, and maintain web- and desktop-based business applications
• Prepare reports, manuals and other documentation on the status, operation, and maintenance of software
• Design, develop, and unit test applications in accordance with established standards.
• Oversee the migration of legacy applications to the current stack.
• Collaborate with the various functions to understand the business needs and translate to the technical team
• Assist in the collection and documentation of user's requirements, development of user stories, estimates and work plans
• Participate in peer-reviews of solution designs and related code.
• Package and support deployment of releases.
• Develop, refine, and tune integrations between applications
• Analyse and resolve technical and application problems.
• Assess opportunities for application and process improvement and prepare documentation of rationale to share with team members and other affected parties.
• Research and evaluate a variety of software products
• Oversee the development and maintenance of current projects.
• Perform backend/database programming for key projects.
• Assist with testing, debugging, documentation and overall quality assurance of projects. Develop and deploy features/projects assigned to the self.
• Research, design and implement technical specifications for projects based on user requirements as indicated in the scope of work, wireframes and/or sitemap documents
• Ensure projects are built to meet performance, security, and functional requirements.
• Be responsible for managing the servers and application architecture as well as the CI/CD pipelines and deployments.
• Adhere to high-quality development principles while delivering solutions on time and on budget.
• Spend at least 25% of your time actually writing code.

Requirements:

• Have engineering management experience in a high-growth start-up or medium-sized product-focused tech company with experience leading developer teams
• Ability to identify the best cloud architecture options (AWS/GCP) to help the firm accomplish its strategic goals
• Minimum 5 years Experience with the Python (Django) web framework for Python
• Full stack Angular experience
• Experience with REST APIs in payments and B2B integrations
• Hands-on experience with relational databases (ideally Postgres)
• Demonstrated track-record of delivering user-centric products with modern technologies for a variety of different problem domains
• Genuinely enjoy mentoring and coaching engineers to guide their professional, technical and personal development as well as motivating and challenging them to focus on delivering high-quality solutions that match the business requirements of a start-up
• Enthusiastic about defining and cultivating a product-oriented engineering culture that instils a spirit of continuous improvement in all aspects of building products, while fostering multi-disciplinary teams that value inclusive and respectful collaboration
• Well organized, able to manage time effectively, and comfortable working across multiple projects/businesses concurrently
• Worked on a diverse set of full stack technologies including experience with web, mobile, data and infrastructure