Senior Software Developer at Code for Africa (CfA)

Required: minimum requirements include:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or a related technical discipline, or equivalent professional experience.
• Five or more years building production systems with Python plus either TypeScript or JavaScript.
• Experience deploying containerised services to at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP or Azure) using Docker/Dokku, Terraform or Pulumi.
• Framework fluency: Django REST (or FastAPI), Next.js (or similar React meta‑framework), and Vega-Lite (or similar data visualisation platforms such as D3.js).
• Proficiency with relational and document databases such as Postgres, MongoDB, and queueing systems like RabbitMQ.
• Working knowledge of observability stacks (Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry) and security best practices (OWASP, SSO, secrets management).
• Track record of leading project teams and shipping well‑tested, well‑documented code in an agile environment.
• Excellent written and verbal communication in English.

Preferred: candidates who are able to demonstrate the following will have an advantage:

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field.
• Experience with open‑source or civic‑tech projects, media or non‑profit environments.
• Hands-on experience with distributed task queues (Celery or Dask),  data‑engineering pipelines (Airflow or Dagster), event orchestration (Prefect or Temporal) and geospatial stacks (PostGIS, GeoJSON, vector tiles).
• Experience building and deploying AI applications in production, with working knowledge of areas such as Large Language Models (LLMs), generative AI, and/or AI agent frameworks.
• French, Arabic, KiSwahili or other widely spoken African languages.

Language and Location Requirements:

• Location: This role is open to remote candidates across Africa. For those preferring an office environment, CfA has labs in Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa.
• Languages: Professional fluency in English (written and verbal) is required.
• Preferred but not required: Proficiency in Arabic, French, KiSwahili, or other major African languages is a valuable asset.x

About the Role:

The successful candidates will join the TechLab. The TechLab is CfA’s specialist software engineering team, developing digital services for the organisation and its human rights partners. Working with our distributed team of engineers, designers, and product managers, you’ll build and scale civic technology, digital democracy solutions, and AI-powered tools that directly empower citizens and make tangible social impact across Africa.

You’ll help shape the technical direction of key products including: 

• CivicSignal (our ML/NLP powered media analysis tools),
• sensors.AFRICA (our environmental monitoring platforms), and
• Our data visualisation apps such as PesaYetu and HURUmap.

Responsibilities: Your daily responsibilities will include:

• Own the architecture, implementation and operation of multi‑tenant web and data platforms, including REST and GraphQL APIs, event streams and real‑time dashboards.
• Drive DevOps practices: CI/CD, infrastructure as code, automated testing and observability
• Lead the technical roadmap for integrating LLMs, retrieval‑augmented generation and agent frameworks into CfA products and platforms.
• Mentor and unblock a distributed team of engineers through code reviews, pair programming and design workshops.
• Establish engineering standards, including data governance and responsible AI guidelines.
• Lead open‑source contributions: review community pull requests and upstream improvements across our public repositories.