Senior Backend Developer - PHP at Brave Venture Labs

About the company...

Motorcycle taxis are immensely popular and serve as the lifeblood of many cities in Africa, but they are extremely unsafe and disorganized. At the click of a button, the company provides a safe, more convenient, mobile-first transportation platform for Africa’s booming young population. On the high-frequency use of their transportation service, the company is providing value to consumers, our drivers, and passengers, with additional financial services, payments, and other on-demand services such as food and grocery delivery to keep Africa moving forward. 

Based in Uganda, Kenya and Nigeria, they are a venture-funded Series B company that is already having a huge impact on millions of people in Africa. They have a passionate and highly engaged team based in East and West Africa and are looking to quickly grow it to speed-up the organization’s growth and make sure they can revolutionize transportation, on-demand services and payments in Africa’s cities. 

They follow agile methodologies in a team split on 2 main products: Mobile Apps for drivers, passengers, agents, and merchants, and a Company Admin Portal.

About the role...

As an experienced Senior Backend Developer in PHP to keep building and maintain one of the best apps in the East African market. The goal is to assure the high quality of our operations and services aiming to the long-term success of our business. The ideal candidate will work hand in hand with our Tech Leads (backend and Mobile) and Product Managers.

They always try to work with the latest technology and are obsessed with the user experience. 5 key parts to the Product; Driver App (Android), Passenger App (Android and iOS Apps), Partner App (Android), Internal Portal (Vue.JS and Elixir) and API Team (PHP migrating to Node JS and Elixir).

Location is Flexible. Candidates based in Uganda/Kenya/Nigeria are encouraged to applied.

Desired Technical Skills:

• Strong knowledge in backend proved by 5+ years of software development experience
• Experience developing in PHP and its frameworks
• Strong knowledge of best practices (we love SOLID!)
• Demonstrated experience producing structured, readable and testable code 
• Have extensive experience working hands-on in an agile environment
• Care about quality and know what it means to ship high quality code
• Ability in identifying, debugging and resolving complex production issues
• Proficient understanding of code versioning tools, such as Git
• Familiarity with continuous integration

Desired Personal Skills:

• Critical thought, analytical thinking and good communication skills
• Capacity to work with members of the team working in different countries
• Good organizational and time management abilities
• Great attention to detail and a results driven approach
• Willing to go above and beyond; we would like someone who wants everything under control and wants to try all the different possibilities that can happen
• An attitude of accountability and knowledge-sharing. You enjoy reviewing others' code and sharing your knowledge
• Demonstrated ability to work independently
• Empathy, respect and a big sense of humor; we are people before engineers
• English communication skills

Perks

• Flexible work hours - We’re pretty flexible when it comes to managing workload and time. It’s about delivery!
• Remote working
• A passionate, inspirational and aspirational team→ Teamwork is in our core values
• Grow yourself -Learning is a habit. We empower people and we want you to grow with us. Tell us the areas you wish to improve in and if it makes sense for the business, we’ll do what we can to help you do just that
• Be part of a passionate team that is changing the mobility landscape in Africa and it’s improving millions of lives
• Opportunity to travel in East Africa and interact with the product and our multi-cultural team

Values

Community – we started as a small community of Boda drivers and we never forget this. We share lunch and we care about our community of staff, drivers, entrepreneurs, and customers. 

Innovation – we challenge the status quo and believe that positive change is possible. We bring solutions that constantly require us to think out of the box.

Transparency – We are open-minded in what we do. We have candor and share our experiences openly without fear of judgment. We love feedback on our product and on our own personal performance so that we can improve every day. 

Safety – if we don’t care about safety ourselves, then how can we change our industry for the better?

Trust – we expect customers to trust our drivers and entrepreneurs, so we need to trust one and another in everything we do.

Integrity - We hold ourselves to the highest standard and we are accountable for our actions. We deliver what we say we will deliver.

Collective Commitment - teams and entrepreneurs are allowed to disagree while a decision is being made; however, everybody must commit to it once a decision has been made. “I agree and I commit, I disagree and I commit”.