Software Engineering Manager at Koko Networks

Your Role

As KOKO grows within and outside Kenya, our team is looking for an Engineering Manager to build and manage part of our growing team of engineers, be responsible for ensuring high standards are maintained and projects are successfully executed.  As such you will play a key role in enabling KOKO’s long term success, including our expansion beyond Nairobi and Kenya. This is a very visible leadership position in which you should be able to influence the decisions of your team without having to make all of them.

In this position, you’ll have the opportunity to contribute and add value across KOKO's entire product suite, through individual contribution, and equally importantly through bringing strong leadership to a group of software engineers. In this role, you should be a "player and coach" - excited about managing and coaching software engineers, as well as contributing, hands-on.

KOKO’s suite of products spans multiple technical domains and disciplines in software and hardware, and so experience in end-to-end systems thinking across distributed components is key.

What you will do

1. You will recruit, manage and provide technical mentorship to engineers through active coaching and setting measurable goals that help them grow and create maximum impact for KOKO.
2. You will build the engineering culture at KOKO, ensuring it is positioned to attract similar minded people with a passion for using technology to tackle some of the hardest challenges.
3. You will work closely with Product and Engineering leaders to contribute to the most valuable areas of technical decision making, advancing key initiatives and reducing risk on critical projects.
4. You will ensure the use of best practices including code reviews, automated testing, CI/CD across teams and projects, and help others to improve the quality of their work.
5. You will serve as a technical authority and represent the full internal and external capabilities of our platforms within and outside the Product and Engineering teams
6. You will review technical designs, and ensure they will be scalable and robust.

KOKO’s current technology stack includes (but is not limited to) AWS, Python, Flask, Vue.js, Postgres, Kotlin, Java, Firebase, C++, Celery, Message Queues, Odoo ERP, Docker, Jenkins, CircleCI, Git

What You Will Bring to KOKO

1. Three or more years of experience directly managing software engineers and 8+ years of experience in software engineering overall.
2. Strong track record leading, developing, and delivering significant software projects
3. Significant experience in the following areas: enterprise application and service based architectures, software design patterns, messaging protocols, cyber security, distributed application development, modern front-end design, highly scalable data architectures.
4. Well developed skills in designing for testability, reliability, security and maintainability.
5. Evangelist for Agile practices, able to work closely with product leaders to support engineering team members in delivering in an agile manner to achieve key goals.
6. Strong communicator, both written and verbal, who is calm and decisive under pressure.
7. Empathy for your colleagues, encouraging team members to think creatively while knowing where to intervene to tackle tough problems and navigate conflicts.

We are looking for a highly technical leader with significant experience in scaling and maintaining complex, mission critical systems, and making key architectural decisions along the way.  You should be comfortable leading and coaching in a remote environment, building rapport across the team, doing what’s necessary to ensure KOKO’s products always deliver.