Software Engineering Manager

NAIROBI /TECHNOLOGY – BACKEND ENGINEERING /FULL TIMEAPPLY FOR THIS JOBAt M-KOPA, We Finance Progress.The scale and impact of our work is massive. M-KOPA is a fast-growing Fin Tech company offering millions of underbanked customers across Africa access to life-enhancing products and services. From our roots as the pioneer in pay-as-you-go “PayGo’” solar energy for off grid homes, we have grown into one of the most advanced connected asset financing platforms in the world, empowering a broad range of customers to achieve progress in their lives. Technology at M-kopaWe are scaling up every technology team to build on of the world’s most innovative Fin Tech platforms. Our technical teams are fully remote, and engineers thrive on a mix of collaboration and autonomy. We hire great people and then trust them to get work done without putting artificial barriers in front of them. We organize the department by discipline and function, so everyone has the chance to pick a lane—but also grow outside, building skills in an environment where good engineering is respected.Software Engineering Manager role is to work Remote within the following time zone GMT -1/GMT +3.At M-KOPA, our Software Engineering Managers are highly skilled engineers who have moved to the management track. To be successful in this position, you need to have worked as an engineer and understand the demanding profession of software engineering, and you'll have extensive experience designing event driven microservice systems.Responsible for multiple cross-discipline teams, you will work with product managers to shape your team's strategic backlog, ensuring that the team leads for each team knows and is bought into the team's strategy. You will empower your team to make good choices around architecture and day-to-day delivery.Under your guidance, each team you look after will be highly engaged, autonomous, and deliver high-quality product iterations at a good velocity. You will demonstrate empathy for our customers, and your colleagues and provide emotional safety within a low ego environment. You will be accountable for the team's delivery and report on mutually agreed SLOs. You will have the autonomy to shape and create new teams under your leadership, with the expectation that your mandate will grow steadily year on year in a growing department. You will empower your teams to have autonomy in their day-to-day activities, and agile practices.Beyond your direct teams, you will also have significant influence in wider departmental decisions and be expected to help with cross-department initiatives that will level up how M-KOPA builds software

To achieve this, you’ll be expected to:

• Put people first, bringing your most empathetic self to work
• Take a product-focused approach to development and drive changes with data
• Have at least 7 years of commercial software engineering experience in either .NET or Android
• You understand that DevOps is a culture, and you know that teams delivering code, infrastructure, and operational support can give the best results
• Know how to empower teams to deliver their best work
• Collaborate with other Software Engineering Managers to grow and improve the department and wider business

You might be a good fit if you...

• Understand that people's problems are the hardest problems
• Challenge the status quo but understand pragmatic decisions
• Enjoy working with cross-functional teams, and collaborating with leads and product managers to deliver change that improves our customers’ lives
• Come to work to learn and share your knowledge, ideas, and thought processes to solve the challenges ahead of you
• We embrace a DevOps culture, so when joining us you’ll be empowering your teams to not on ship code, but own the whole cycle from ideation to production support and Engineering Manager Job Description 3 every step in between

A bit about us…

• We primarily use .NET for our backend and Kotlin for our Android apps, we also have a few other internal tools that may need a bit of attention; our teams use some flavor of Scrum where they keep track of their work in Azure DevOps, which we also use for our CI/CD. Our cloud provider is Azure, where our microservices are hosted in Azure Kubernetes Services
• We are a team of passionate product-focused engineers committed to building and fostering an environment where our employees feel valued. We encourage knowledge sharing and learning as much as possible on the job. We are building a whole new set of microservices based on Event-Driven Architecture patterns. We believe this is a great moment to join our team
• We strongly encourage applications from gender and sexually diverse communities and/or people with intersectional identities 

The hiring process...

• CV screening from our hiring managers
• 1 set of screening interview questions emailed to you to see how you express yourself in writing and your experience; or a Teams call with our Talent Acquisition Team
• 60-minute cultural interview; to understand your ways of working and values.
• A take-home exercise.
• 2-hour review of your take-home exercise and conversational Q&A. We’ll share the questions ahead of time.
• 45-minute interview with either the Head of Engineering or CTO

What you’ll get in return:

• Competitive salary
• Annual L&D budget, both time and money
• $1,000 to invest in your home office
• Equity in a fast-growing company
• Good work-life balance
• Optional travel to our African markets
• Annual whole tech team meetup

M-KOPA is an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer committed to assembling a diverse, broadly trained staff. Women, minorities, and people with disabilities are strongly encouraged to apply.M-KOPA does not collect/charge any money as a pre-employment or post-employment requirement. This means that we never ask for ‘recruitment fees’, ‘processing fees’, ‘interview fees’ or any other kind of money in exchange for offer letters or interviews at any time during the hiring process.