Senior Software Engineer (Remote)
Rising Academies, Kenya
Job Description
We are seeking a highly motivated, professional, and natural leader for a full-stack Senior Engineer, reporting to the CTO at Rising Academies. The Senior Software Engineer will plan and direct development work on complex products, along with engaging various teams in design and development of solutions that are used by school leaders, teachers, students, and parents across sub-Saharan Africa and beyond. On the leadership front, the Senior Software Engineer will manage, train, and mentor a team of Engineers and Developers. By working with the other departments and teams, the Senior Engineer will lead the execution of various key products at Rising.
The Senior Software Engineer will:
- Leverage MongoDB, Express, Angular, React, and Node to help build web applications.
- Serve as Rising’s engineering leader and technical expert.
- Build from scratch, and manage, a new software development team, which will require defining scope of roles and projects, allocating resourcing, and handling scale up of software products.
- Create detailed engineering plans, processes, and procedures for engineering staff to use.
- Hold engineering staff accountable to relevant protocols and procedures, as well as project expectations and deadlines.
- Propose and oversee budgets and timelines for engineering projects, working hand in hand with the Product Team to ensure deadlines are realistic and always met.
- Support Business Development teams to assess technical feasibility of proposed solutions.
- Work with Academic and Country teams to understand requirements and create design documents as required.
- Build new features and improve existing features using modern best-practices such as version control, continuous integration, automated tests, and daily deploys.
- Effectively communicate and collaborate with our multicultural Development, Product, Data, and Impact teams, among others, around the globe.
- Build software that can be easily and effectively used by groups of people facing unique challenges (remote locations, low levels of literacy, no experience with technology, etc.).
- Spearhead various research and development initiatives to identify opportunities for new products and improve processes.
- Design and implement scalable web services, applications, and APIs that primarily work offline or with limited connectivity.
- Identify bottlenecks and improve software efficiency.
Requirements
Qualifications and Experience:
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science or other related fields, master’s degree a plus
- Minimum 10 years of professional experience in the IT/Engineering sector
- Minimum 4 years of professional experience as a senior engineer and line manager of other engineers/ engineer teams
- At least 5 years experience as a Full MEAN Stack Developer
- Experience with Database integration
- Experience with PWAs and Android mobile development
- Experience building APIs
- Experience in JIRA, Scrum
- Experience in cloud, data/cyber security, AI, and chatbot development
- Experience in building products that work offline and with limited connectivity
- Experience with CommCare, WhatsApp Bots, Enterprise Bot Manager, Turn.io, Twilio, Google Dialogue Flow, Google Data Studio a plus
- Experience with biometrics solutions
About You:
- You have a strong track record of professionalism and trustworthiness
- You possess effective communication, relationship building, and teamwork skills
- You have a strong track record of managing engineers and developers who have directly reported to you
- You can take initiative and problem-solve when challenges arise, communicating with stakeholders proactively
- You are comfortable working with senior leadership and proactively reporting on data and outcomes
- You have a strong ability to keep a team on task
- You are willing to take risks, fail, learn, give and receive feedback, and try new approaches
- You are passionate about improving the quality of education across Africa
Benefits
We offer a competitive salary and benefits package. We regularly benchmark our compensation against comparable businesses, social ventures and non-profits.
Rising’s goal is to be transparent about salaries at all levels of the organization and have a standard, global pay scale for all positions that is non-negotiable.
The benefits we offer are built to have a strong added value on our staff’s well-being and we look forward to discussing more details about the benefits for this role over the course of the process.