Software Architect at Pagatech Limited

Location: Yaba, Lagos
Sector: Financial Services
Reports To: Lead Software Architect or Business Lead

Summary
Our purpose at Paga is to make it simple for 1 billion people to access and use money. We do that by delivering innovative financial services to the mass market across large, underserved markets. At Paga we value above all else, Collaboration, Ownership, Results Orientation Integrity and Innovation (CORII).

Product development activities at Paga fall within the Product Development group, which has distinct, full-stack (from a resource perspective) teams dedicated to different functional organization unit in the company. For example, one of the functional teams in the Product Development team is the Agent Network Team which is responsible for development and delivery of products used by the large network of financial service delivery point (agents), across the countries where Paga exists. As a full-stack team, this team includes project management, product management, software and database engineering, quality assurance, and UI/UX/Product-Design resources. All teams execute product development using agile (Scrum) methodologies.

As a Software Architect at Paga, you will be responsible for the technical ownership of entire products, platforms or services within the scope of Paga’s business.  You will be responsible for designing and delivering systems that meet all the “ities” expected of enterprise-grade, financial systems (scalability, extensibility, security, etc.). You will be responsible for the technical oversight of one or more teams of Software and Database Engineers, working with you to realize your product vision.

Paga has a distributed product development team with resources split between Lagos, Mexico City, London and Addis Ababa, so this role, comes with the expectation of very strong remote collaboration and self-management skills. There will be the possibility of occasional, but rare (twice a year at most) travel to some of the Paga office locations for training, team events, user-engagement and general market-empathy development.

To be an effective Software Architect at Paga you must:

• Be able to quickly grasp abstract concepts and translate them into appropriately abstract or detailed software design and implementation.
• Be comfortable taking ownership for broad and important areas of enterprise software implementation.
• Be a core business resource for both technical and non-technical decision making and triage and makes themselves available to this effect.
• Possess mastery over all key aspects of the frameworks and tools within your scope and have strong business-knowledge in the business functional areas you support. Have multi-functional expertise across large areas of the platform/services.
• Be comfortable in making technical decisions based on the consideration of many potential futures in decision making without knowing exactly what the future is.
• Clearly understand and effectively weigh business trade-offs in decision-making.
• Be comfortable operating at both a high and deep-dive (low) levels of abstraction.
• Be able to multi-task well and be comfortable juggling multiple product-development streams at once.
• Be comfortable with rapid change and be comfortable taking ownership to deliver results in a high-pressure product development environment.
• Have a passion for quality and an ability and willingness to grow the ability of others in your team to meet those standards. Drive quality delivery across teams with which you work.

As a distributed product development team member, communication and collaboration are key. You will need to be excellent at utilizing remote communication tools and applying clear communication and collaboration practices to effectively engage with your “customers”, teammates and other company stakeholders.

Primary Responsibilities

• Vision & Strategic Leadership – Help develop and grow the technical vision for the Paga business and engage meaningful in the strategic development of the overall business. Engage directly in business strategic leadership when it relates to product and technical decision making.
• Broad-scoped Technical Ownership – Independently oversees all software concerns for some of the major platform areas or services. Own end-to-end responsibility for a large portion of the software system including design and implementation and including a strong knowledge of complementary engineering aspects such as data management, dev-ops and infrastructure. Own responsibility for key delivery criteria such as performance, reliability, cost, security and maintainability for large portions of the system
• Technical Leadership -- Oversees key architectural concerns such as security, scalability/performance, reliability, maintainability, and modularity. Applies a platform-wide perspective to decision making around these concerns, including infrastructural, deployment, delivery and other technically relevant concerns.
• Process Leadership -- Drive development and improvement of technical product development processes in collaborations with product development management.
• Code Quality Review -- Provide broad-scoped yet in-depth code review for technically complex and high-impact code changes.
• Partner Engagement - Working effectively with industry/ecosystem partners to accomplish product goals

Qualifications
Knowledge and Skill Requirements:

• A Degree in a related discipline
• 10+ years of continuous experience working on enterprise software application development or an Advanced Degree in a related discipline and at least 8 years of continuous experience working on enterprise software application development
• Must have completed the mandatory NYSC.

Other Key Competencies:

• Outstanding critical thinking skills
• Excellent software design and development skills.
• Strong strategic thinking skills
• Excellent J2EE & Spring Framework software development experience
• Proven ability to lead an engineering team effectively
• Adept at agile development practices
• Strong multi-tasking and self-management skills
• Curious, self-driven and meticulous.