Chief Technology Officer at BuuPass Inc

The CTO, Chief Technology Officer, will lead the product strategy for the wide-range of innovations incubating the company’s products. You will build and lead a small team of product developers that will define and drive roadmaps for the diverse technologies within Buupass portfolio. In this position you will collaborate closely with the marketing, sales and executive teams on planning and execution, while focusing the product teams to establish a high level of team participation and interaction across product stakeholders, serve as an inspiring mentor and coach, ensure quality is a high priority at every stage, and move innovative technologies into other Buupass departments or the market in the desired timeframes. You need to be able to engage, influence and collaborate with sales, marketing, and executive teams across.

Requirements

Technical

• Full-stack web generalist with solid experience in building elegant and human-friendly web applications. Basically, they should cover these minimum requirements:
  • Languages – PHP, Java, HTML5, CSS, SQL, XML
  • Frameworks – jQuery, Node.js, laravel, yii, cake, codeigniter
  • Databases – MySQL, NoSQL
  • Database designing and knowledge of relational database systems, object oriented programming and web application development.
  • Understanding of REST API/ JSON is a must
  • Experience in e-commerce platforms, payment gateway integration & operations will be a big advantage especially, on content-heavy platforms.
  • Ability to decipher and write complex database queries for analysis
  • Good to have knowledge of AWS Cloud Hosting, GCP, Hostgator and Microsoft Azure
  • Understanding of load balancing,  scalability issues and their solutions
  • User authentication and authorization between multiple systems, servers, and environments
  • Knowledge and experience with API development and integrations.
  • Experience with App development and/or chatbots is a plus
  • Develop new user-facing features
  • Creating website layout/user interfaces by using standard html/css practices
  • Experience with creating beautiful, dynamic and user-friendly web applications
  • Ensure the technical feasibility of UI/UX designs
  • Understanding of open source projects like Drupal, WordPress, SquareSpace, Magento (CE and EE), Shopify, BigCommerce, OpenCart, PrestaShop etc
• They should be able to quickly learn new languages, frameworks, and technologies as needed.
• They should be able to switch between tech stacks.
• Solid proficiency with other dynamic languages such as Ruby and Python is preferred
• Basic knowledge of search engine optimization process.
• Experience with USSD/SMS based applications and VAS technologies is a strong point
• They should be meticulous with documentation and quality control
• They should have experience with building strong and scalable system architecture
• Extensive experience working as a developer
• Experience working in a customer facing role
• Experience with devops
• Several years of experience as a team lead or people manager in a technical environment (preferably in the e-commerce sector). Experience with using agile methodologies for product development. Strong preference for candidates with some sort of SCRUM certification. Some sort of knowledge of design thinking will be a plus.
• Experience with (and advocate of) modern development techniques including Behaviour Driven Development, test automation, continuous delivery, infrastructure as code, continuous user testing.
• Interest in new innovations such as machine learning, AI, blockchain etc.

Soft Skills

• Possess strong leadership skills such as people management, initiative, communication and data-driven decision making
• Team player and creative thinker, with a strong belief in productivity and delivery
• Puts the company first and strongly believes in the company’s vision
• Comfortable working under and with women leaders
• Comfortable working for with a diverse, non-technical, and younger team
• Comfortable working with a fast-moving distributed (sometimes remote) team and is an effective self-manager
• Excellent communication and listening skills, especially with a diverse team and non-technical colleagues; values transparency in decision-making
• Takes the initiative to get feedback, and asks for help when needed, in order to foster active learning and continuous productivity.
• Highly committed and disciplined
• Believes in the value of a  team and readily participates in team building activities
• Friendly and likeable vibe (“nice guy” vibe)
• Preferably well-connected  in the Kenyan tech scene
• Believes in always over-delivering, and doing work with excellence
• Enterprising personality type
• Excited about the potential of the African market
• Constantly innovating and  coming up with ways to upgrade and expand our product line
• Flexible; incorporating user feedback into product development, and responding to market needs, even if the latter involves coming up with new features/applications

Responsibilities

• Analyze the current codebase we have, maintain and improve it
• Bringing the product to market. Build lean MVPs to test and iterate quickly based on user feedback
• Provide budget-friendly, cost-effective recommendations for product development
• Work with the team to help provide strategies for business development and marketing, by providing technical perspective/insight
• Actively adding to the codebase. Performing varied development tasks across the entire stack.
• Gather and prioritize requirements and features
• Managing other developers, implementing best practice such as TDD, Agile processes, creating shared coding standards, and overall ensuring that the team is producing high quality, easily maintainable code.
• Ownership over the application roadmap, also guiding architecture-level decisions. Set the structure and goals for the development team, provide technical direction, lead the development of tools to make scalable web applications.
• Architect for scaling

Benefits

• Competitive compensation, medical insurance
• Opportunity to take an early stage startup to the next level: investor-readiness and scale across Africa
• A productive and fun work environment
• Contributing to the transportation revolution in Africa