Head of Engineering at Sparkle Nigeria

About the Role

• We are looking for an extremely talented individual who will lead the evolution of our product and technology strategy, along with build a growing team of software engineers.
• The ideal candidate has prior experience in a senior technical leadership capacity and has deep expertise in building and shipping products as well as able to manage engineering teams.
• Our company is growing at a very fast space and as such we are looking for someone with experience in sourcing and hiring engineers as well as the ability to structure engineering teams.
• This role requires someone who has deep knowledge of application lifecycles, databases and services and able to introduce processes and systems to help scale our technology infrastructure.

Responsibilities
What you get to do everyday:
Product Development:

• Owns all initiatives to develop and scale Sparkle’s products and features.
• Defining a technology road map with organisation & business goals envisioning the tech stack required to scale the business with a long-term technology vision.
• Responsible for managing Sparkle’s product back-end, front-end, infrastructure, architecture and scalability
• Work closely with the business and engineering teams on issues related to design and requirements
• Help development team to build high quality products. Make all developers aware what are the quality standards in organization, what value they bring in and encourage them to make the standards even better
• Understanding business needs for defining engineering and product building requirements
• Provides inputs, estimates and plans for product and feature development
• Setting and managing expectations for feature and product development
• Monitoring and supporting apps and handle issues that get escalated.
• Be ready to get your hands dirty with actual coding as and when needed, we expect you to spend 40% time doing hands on technical work and test 60% on management activities.

Process Management:

• Establish and stimulate software development standards and processes along with best practices for delivery of scalable and high-quality software.
• Develop deep and strong understanding the technologies, tools and techniques used within the team
• Championing best software engineering practices like design, code reviews etc.

People Management:

• Being a technical mentor - Manage and review the technical contribution of engineers.
• Leading and building engineering teams which comprises of back-end, front-end, mobile and DevOps engineers.
• Work closely with the People & Culture team in hiring engineers including preparing job descriptions, identifying skillsets, developing hiring tests and participating in  interviews
• Setting up short bursts of hackathons with the team to accelerate ideas to the experimentation stage.

About You
Education:

• Bachelor’s Degree / Nano Degree or certification in Computer Science / Software Engineering. 

Experience:

• 10 to 15 years cumulative experience developing high-scalable software products in PHP7/8. This role also requires at least 5 years of experience managing engineering teams.
• Must have a background in working in the finance and banking industry with solid industry knowledge. 

Engineering Skills Required:

• Must have previously worked as a software engineer at a senior level.
• Proficient in Laravel or Symfony and have a deep understanding of the basics
• Ability to write well-structured, efficient, and maintainable code and actively keep the quality of the codebase in check
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills  

People Management Skills:

• You feel comfortable with managing complex engineering teams and have worked in a leadership role in a fast-paced start-up
• Must have a lot of experience managing or mentoring the performance and development of high-performing engineers
• Must know what good looks like for a high-performing team of engineers and know-how to get there
• Has experience hiring excellent engineers
• Must have an empathetic leadership style and able to build strong and effective relationship with the team.