Senior Back End Engineer (SRE)

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 experienced backend engineers to join the Site Reliability Engineering Team, whose mission is to ensure KOKO delivers a highly reliable, scalable, secure, and cost-effective cloud platform to its users.

Your role will require you to lead on development projects relating to these areas and be responsible for their successful execution. You will keep a watchful eye on our systems’ capacity and performance, optimise our software’s use of resources and strengthen security. 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 to enabling KOKO’s expansion within and outside of Kenya

What you will do

• Lead projects to deliver performance improvements in areas you identify with the SRE and the wider engineering team
• Review and improve on our software designs to deliver improvements to the reliability and scalability of our systems and services
• Strengthen our security posture by reviewing and implementing improvements conformant with secure coding standards
• Work alongside other engineers on the team to elevate technology and consistently apply best practices.
• Help others to improve the quality of their work through regular design and code reviews
• Support DevOps engineers in the SRE team with software development tasks as needed
• Be on-call to manage high priority issues when needed, in collaboration with other engineering team members via our incident response processes.
• Participate in building the engineering culture at KOKO

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

What You Will Bring to KOKO

• At least four years experience developing applications at enterprise scale using the front and back end technologies in our stack
• Experience in the following areas: enterprise application and service based architectures, software design methods, CI/CD, cyber security, process automation, QA and test automation, and highly scalable data architectures.
• Ability to develop robust and scalable backend services defined by RESTful APIs in Python
• Familiarity with Cloud/ SaaS architectures and how to build secure and maintainable services
• Strong understanding of unit testing, design patterns and usage of tools like profilers
• 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
• Great oral and written communication skills

What We Offer

• Competitive salary plus a quarterly cash bonus
• Annual compensation reviews - we reward great work
• 21 days of annual leave plus public holidays plus examination leave
• Hybrid working model - allowing you to split your time between in-person collaboration at one of our offices and working remotely
• 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
• Health insurance

We believe that our people are critical for our ambitious growth plans in Kenya and beyond. We want to build an organisation where people thrive, feel included, grow professionally, and enjoy having high impact through their work.

If you share our passion for technology and our vision for global impact, we strongly encourage you to apply!

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