Principal Engineer

About KOKO Networks
KOKO Networks is a venture-backed climate-tech company with 1,200+ employees across East Africa & India. Our mission is to imagine and deliver technology that improves life in the world’s fastest growing cities. We offer a fast-paced and highly collaborative work environment with significant opportunities for professional growth. Our core lines of business currently include: (1) KOKO Fuel, an ultra-clean liquid bioethanol cooking fuel solution delivered via a network of smart fuel ATMs and leveraging existing downstream liquid fuels infrastructure; (2) KOKO Climate, which retails the emissions reductions that occur from switching households from deforestation-based charcoal to KOKO Fuel; and (3) KOKO Club, a tech-enabled, direct-to-consumer, instant fulfillment retail platform operated in partnership with neighborhood retailers. In 2021, KOKO was selected as the world’s leading emerging markets climate technology solution by FT/IFC.

Your Role

As KOKO grows within and outside Kenya, our team is looking for highly experienced software engineers to guide the development of our cloud based products, and be responsible for development and implementation of the technical roadmaps associated with them.

In this position, you’ll have the opportunity to contribute and add value across key areas of KOKO's product suite, through individual contribution, and equally importantly through bringing strong leadership and direction.

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

• Shape large components of KOKO’s technical strategy, ensuring that it meets functional and non functional needs (e.g. performance, maintainability, monitorability, security and reliability).
• Own high level technical architecture decisions across multiple areas and guide others in making the right design and implementation choices in their areas
• Review design work of new projects in other teams, thinking through complex issues in advance, and anticipating potential pitfalls.
• Proactively seek and identify improvements to KOKO technology whilst balancing the needs of existing projects.
• Provide technical delivery assurance for multiple software projects in an agile team-based environment, acting as a subject matter expert across several product/technology areas
• Review quality processes in operation on projects and ensure that team members adhere to agreed systems and standards.
• Mentor and support other engineers in their career progression, and provide candid appraisals and counselling
• Evangelise of newer technologies helping KOKO systems to be more efficient, reliable and performant, driving PoCs where necessary.
• Organise and deliver training across the team, in order that the team’s overall knowledge and awareness of key skills is well maintained.
• Assess effort estimations and provide the complete technical picture that others need to guide their decision making.

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

What You Will Bring to KOKO

• Significant experience leading design and development of cloud applications at enterprise scale using relevant technologies for our stack
• Deep experience with Cloud/ SaaS architectures and how to build secure, maintainable, scalable, high availability services
• Expert understanding of unit testing, design patterns and use of software analysis tools (profilers, static code analysis etc)
• 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.
• Well developed skills in designing for testability, reliability, security and maintainability.
• Experience with source control and continuous integration tools (We use GIT and Jenkins)
• Experience working in an Agile multi-functional team
• Thrive in an environment that requires you to partner with multiple cross-functional teams as stakeholders/customers
• You are strongly motivated by seeing high quality outcomes delivered, and hold yourself personally accountable, jumping in and taking ownership of problems as needed to ensure the desired outcomes.
• Great oral and written communication skills

What We Offer

• Competitive salary plus a quarterly cash bonus
• Annual compensation reviews - we reward great work
• Company Mediclaim plan
• Hybrid working model - allowing you to split your time between in-person collaboration at one of our offices and working remotely
• 21 days of annual leave plus public holidays plus examination leave
• Ongoing investment in you and your skills, incl. full access to over 5,000 online courses
• The right equipment for the job - a choice of MacBook, Windows, or Linux laptop

KOKO is committed to gender and racial diversity in the workplace. We encourage candidates of all backgrounds to apply!