Full-Stack Engineer at Sokowatch

Do you value autonomy and live to work on open source and edge technologies? Have you deployed full apps end-to-end with major involvement in these areas? Do you enjoy leading full-stack project-based development that involves front-end, back-end, deployment and analytics? Do you have a growing set of tools that gets you there faster with less bespoke code written? We're looking for you.

Sokowatch is seeking an experienced full-stack engineer with brilliant DevOps and scripting experience to help teams take their ideas through product discovery to Version 1, and beyond.

Duties & Responsibilities:

• Advise innovation & engineering teams by researching, identifying & implementing internal APIs from external open-source projects and academic papers
• Build automation scripts and live-data prototypes with great documentation to accelerate the product discovery cycle, following DRY principles.
• Manage, document and test the integrity of the information flowing between API clients and the main Sokowatch system
• Write technical specifications or implement automation via scripting through Notebooks, Google Apps Scripts or independent scripting tools for internal teams as part of the product building cycle
• Assist with troubleshooting, refactoring and micro-services planning for handover to the Core Engineering team after incubation of the products

Requirements:

• Demonstrable experience building platforms end-to-end and methodologies on how to go from zero to very usable in compelling time frames.
• Lives by these 3 principles: Don't reinvent the wheel. Don't repeat yourself. Everything with a cycle can and should be automated.
• Full-stack experience: front-end, back-end, DevOps, scripting.
• Ability to research, identify, implement and troubleshoot open-source platforms.
• Docker for deployment to allow working with platforms in new programming languages.
• Ability to troubleshoot code in top programming languages, specifically Ruby, Python, Javascript.
• Epic communication skills and empathy for users, junior engineers and product teams.
• Passion and drive for solving problems.
• Creative thinking skills with an emphasis on developing innovative solutions that leapfrog complex problems that may not have one clear answer.
• Naturally curious and constantly improving.

Innovation Engineering Principles

• We build for the root problems we observe and validate, not the symptomatic problems we hear.
• We build inclusive technology solutions for the mass market that deliver simple, high-quality experiences to underserved users and drive large user numbers for our clients.
• We anticipate “the user” and their nuances because we have built inclusive platforms at scale, saving product discovery resources.
• We find validation in the engagement and usability of our platforms.
• We give the highest ROI when building and improving technology.
• We build for ambitious and new visions and take ethical shortcuts where possible because we're innovating e.g MPesa self-limiting their wallet to 70k and moving faster than the regulator.
• We drive influence through value, not authority.
• We use our experience with users to ensure that our support teams (PMs and researchers) are only managing edge assumptions.
• We drive our ambitious agenda and make users fit into our vision for them, but also clearly see and pivot when we find roadblocks.
• We prefer honesty over tact.
• We share knowledge and are self-motivated to automate menial tasks for our clients that would give them more time to support the technology we're building together.
• We anticipate and accelerate features that will be required despite assumptions and pivots e.g. logging in, analytics, hosting, etc.
• Our prototypes are good for 50,000 - 100,000 users where we ignore computation costs to drive momentum and refactor & improve with more traffic.
• We chase for the novelty (“Wow”, “God bless you”, …) moments from our users more than we chase the basic “Aha” moment or 100% bug-free platforms to ensure our users are motivated to use our platforms while we build fast and break things quickly.