Technology Lead at Standard Chartered Bank Kenya

Purpose

SC Ventures (SCV) spearheads innovation across Standard Chartered. Included in SCV's mandate will be to invest in FinTech's and other start-up companies, promote rapid testing and implementation of new business models. Solv Vietnam is set up as an e-commerce marketplace to transform the traditional B2B supply chain, supporting SMEs with easier and faster access to finance.

Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for AgriTech ideally operates out of Nairobi focusing on taking into production the technology stack, product roadmap, engineering team, and solution delivery for the agriculture ecommerce (eCom) platform. The candidate has hands-on technology leadership with engineering experience to deliver and production operation of the platform. Primary collaboration with Andela with local and remote teams.

The CTO is responsible for building the software development strategy and implementation of software application solutions roadmap to meet business requirements and will manage the software development team, associated risk management and compliance requirements as well as build capability in their respective software engineering functional organization.

Business

• Working with Venture Lead, Product Owners, and partners to lead technology delivery, evaluate technology trade-offs, oversee vendor engineering and integrations, and deliver features and capabilities aligned to the business model to build take a minimum viable product (MVP) to successful country-wide rollout.
• Software Development Strategy and Roadmap, including operations and technology support to deliver on committed service quality.
• Establish the budget for software development plans and manage operational costs within approved budget.
• CTO will discuss with partners, fintechs, co-creation clients, and business to expand the offering of SCF.
• Co-ordinate, question and interrogate technology opportunities with offshore engineering team and local engineers to innovate and sustain a competitive advantage.
• Collaborate with Kenya-based technology team and overseas engineers to deliver AgriTech stack.
• Employ a managerial mindset that seeks to optimise the business outcome for the Venture while establishing sound governance, internal process, adherence to policies and processes.
• Thought leadership and demonstratable subject matter expertise on use of machine learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI), APIs, cyber security, DevSecOps and similar technology applications.
• Establish sound technology operation covering incident management, problem management, service levels (SLAs) and business continuity processes
• Identify risks during operations, coordinate with tech team to develop methods of measuring, assessing, and minimizing risks, overcoming and improving risk points.

Technical Skills

• Expert knowledge on mainstream cloud provider (AWS), Cloud-native services, and elastic cloud infrastructure.
• Background in .NET technology stack, Kubernetes, distributed systems, session management and authentication, asynchronous event processing, message queues, and architecture patterns.
• Knowledgeable on modern object orientated programming practises including entity frameworks, dynamic reflection, and reusable interfaces, technology platform operations including event handling, logging, monitoring and capacity planning.
• Familiarity with 3rd party system integrations via APIs (HTTP/REST), host-to-host (file exchange by FTP), with background jobs processing of real-time, event triggered, and async automations.
• Familiar with OWASP, secure by design, secure coding practises, code scanning, unit testing, dependency management (deprecation, vulnerabilities, licensing)
• Extensive experience with DevOps including pipeline, release management, and managing multi AWS account deployments.
• Engage with scrum teams, engineers, and ensuring reliable delivery of sprints, change management of features and bug fixes, and backlog
• Experience with operating highly-available production financial systems and integration with financial systems
• Ability to wear multiple hats such as individual contributor, team lead, solution architect, facilitator.
• Beneficial is knowledge of FinTech ecosystem, inclusive of Blockchain, Digital Payments, Primer Services and Transaction Banking Enhancements, as well as other innovations in this space.

Responsibilities

Overall

• Expertise and professional experience in software development and deep understanding of technology delivery.
• Participate in assessing and hiring technical personnel required to be part of AgriTech, and support the growth in aggressive fast scale-up in local go-to-market.
• Familiarity with ERP and financial systems (purchase orders, invoices, receipts) is desirable.
• Participate with anchor and banks / financial service providers in establishing new integrations for supply chain and trade related data exchange.
• Engage with relevant Standard Chartered Functions
• Knowledgeable on including Technology and Information and Cyber Security (ICS) for governance and key-control-indicators.
• Advantageous to have experience in ITIL and ISO27001.

People and Talent

• Lead by example and build the appropriate culture and values.
• Create a motivational and challenging environment in the team which is conducive to creativity and delivery of the strategy.

Governance

• Act and escalate quickly when any risk and control weakness become apparent and ensure they are addressed within an appropriate timeframe and escalated through the relevant committees.
• Work with multiple stakeholders to establish applicable risk / control framework.
• Familiarise self with governance structures and mandatory bank processes.

Regulatory & Business Conduct

• Display exemplary conduct and live by SCB Values and Code of Conduct.
• Take personal responsibility for embedding the highest standards of ethics, including regulatory and business conduct. This includes understanding and ensuring compliance with, in letter and spirit, all applicable laws, regulations, guidelines and SCB Group Code of Conduct.
• Effectively and collaboratively identify, escalate, mitigate and resolve risk, conduct and compliance matters.

Key Stakeholders

• CTO, SC Ventures
• Venture Lead / CEO
• Engineering/ Build team
• Product Owner/ Commercial Lead
• Project lead
• Risk & Compliance lead

Our Ideal Candidate

Training

• A Bachelor's degree or higher Software Engineering, Computer Science, System Engineering, Information Technology or related discipline.

Work experience

• At least 5 years of work experience as an engineering lead across multiple teams.
• At least 5 years of managerial experience in a similar leadership role.
• Experienced in a fast paced, Agile continuous integration environment.
• Experienced architecting, leading and contributing to software architecture.