Job Openings at M-KOPA Nigeria

About the Role

• Like most businesses, M-KOPA has a significant, on-going need for analytical data. We firmly believe that the ability to convert our system data into strategic/product insights will be one of our most important competencies during our next 5+ years of growth.
• Currently, there are two key groups of people involved in the analytical data landscape in the organisation. Upstream we have software engineers (primarily backend software engineers), who write and maintain the systems from where our data originates.
• Downstream there are analysts and BI developers. They are tasked to create reports, dashboards and operational data sets using the accessible data taken from the event streams or transactional database exports.
• What is currently missing in our data systems is a function to work in the middle of M-KOPA’s backend engineers, analysts and BI developers. The creation of this position, and its supporting team, aims to solve that challenge.
• You will be leading the Analytics Engineering team, who will be responsible for transforming data from M-KOPA’s transactional data systems into data sets that will be supporting analyses and sustaining routine reporting.
• Your team will be working with BI developers, backend engineers, product managers and business stakeholders to understand their analytical data needs and design efficient data models for meeting them.
• It is a fully Remote role, within the following time zone (UTC -1 / UTC+3) and you will report to our CTO - Owen Scott.

Job Responsibilities
You’re excited about this opportunity because you will:

• You enjoy working with many stakeholders across the business, like BI developers and business leaders to deeply understand key reporting and analytics requirements for a wide range of use-cases.
• Facilitating cross-team discussions around the definition and modeling of key business concepts.
• Interfacing with backend developers to design data access patterns that appropriately manage trade-offs between M-KOPA’s analytical capabilities and transactional software flexibility.
• Recruiting and supporting a small, world-class, team of Analytics/Data Engineers, providing capacity for M-KOPA to build and maintain analytical data sets across a growing range of domains and use-cases.
• Ensuring that analytical data systems are built to the standard of any other production software system, with emphasis on good practices like observability and infrastructure-as-code.
• Ensuring that analytical data systems are built securely, with appropriate access controls and PII protections.
• Leading M-KOPA’s drive to obtain impactful, real-time access to analytical data; relentlessly driving both commercial strategy and customer experience and helping M-KOPA to live up to its fullest potential as a modern, data-driven company.

Job Requirements
We’re excited about you because you have experience with:

• Experience with modern engineering practices, including observability, CI/CD, infrastructure as-code, and testability.
• A mature data modeling skillset, with a particular emphasis on event-based systems and a proven ability to translate between business use-cases and data model design.
• Demonstrated capability with large-scale software systems, with a particular emphasis on distributed systems.
• Enough experiencing with networking and cloud infrastructure security to be able to stitch a range components together without making any major mistakes
• An interest in being “more than an engineer” and with engaging directly with commercial and customer experience challenges.
• Experience recruiting, supporting, and motivating a world-class engineering team.

Our stack:

• dbt for Transformation
• Looker for visualisation
• Spark / Data Factory / Event Hub / Airflow for ingestion (we’re working on making this simpler in platform)
• Airflow / AKS for orchestration
• Microsoft Azure as our base cloud provider.

What's In It For You

• Private health insurance (inpatient outpatient, maternity, eye care, dental and gym facilities)
• Group Life Cover and Personal Accident Cover
• Company pension (A mandatory basic national social security scheme)
• Remote working (dependent on the nature of the role)
• Airtime allowance (dependent on the nature of the role)
• MIFI monthly payment for remote workers
• 20 days per annum (excluding public holidays). Annual leave is accrued at the standard rate of 1.75 days per month
• Annual Learning and Development Fund - You have an annual $ 1,200 allowance to spend on learning and development (that is, between 1 January and 31 December). For your first year at M-KOPA, this allowance is pro-rated depending on the month that you start.
• Home Office Set Up - Having the best IT equipment tools in the world doesn't make sense if you do not have a proper setup to work with. For this reason, M-KOPA will pre-approve the following items for a total budget of $1000 that you can use at any time after signing the offer letter with M-KOPA (you may purchase desk and chair separately or together; before or after your start date)
• On site retreats with wider tech team, plus trips to operational markets+

go to method of application »

About the Role

First and foremost, we are looking for someone who is excited about what we do. You don’t need to be an expert in FinTech but should be keen to learn and apply our company’s values.

You are going to be part of our Backend team of 66 engineers and team leads, who work fully remote from UK, Europe and Africa.

As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will be working in small team of backend engineers, product managers and testers, focused on improving our end users’ product experience.

You will deliver event-driven systems that cope with millions of daily transactions and push to production multiple times a day. You will own the whole SDLP process and will drive development using testing best practices (i.e., TDD).

We are a team of passionate product-focused engineers committed building and fostering an environment where our colleagues feel valued. We encourage knowledge sharing and learning as much as possible.

It is a fully remote role, within the following time zone (UTC -1 / UTC+3). You will report to the Engineering Team Lead. 

You’re excited about this opportunity because you will

• If you like to put your people and teammates first, you bring your most empathetic self to work

• You like to take a product-focused approach to development and drive changes using data to guide your decisions

• Be delivering high quality backend code into production on a regular basis and have a direct impact in our wider organisation.

• You embrace DevOps mindset and understand its benefits it brings to the team

• Working in a team makes you happy and you like collaborating with other teams to grow and improve the department and wider business

• Your work will directly impact the experience of millions of people based in Africa

• Demonstrating low ego and team spirit

• Taking ownership of your work, partnering with cross functional peers to ensure projects are properly scoped and implemented

• Advocating of CI / CD best practices and understand the importance of writing clean code

• Be willing to explore and learn new technologies outside of your comfort zone

We’re excited about you because you have experience with

• You have at least 3 years’ experience working as a professional software engineer/architect on medium/large scale distributed system

• You have commercial experience with C#.NET and microservices, as well as shipping high-quality backend code into production

• You have knowledge of Azure and AKS or other containerized application deployment tools

• You are comfortable with the DevOps culture, and with the idea of being involved with the management of the systems that you build through their entire lifecycle

• You have a collaborative spirit and a strong desire to learn from teammates, learning to work as part of a team that is greater than the sum of its parts

• It will be highly beneficial if you have knowledge of the financial services industry and the African market

• A degree in computer science or a related field will be beneficial, however, we care much more about your skills than about how you acquired them

Our stack

• We primarily use .NET for our backend and Kotlin for our Android apps

• Our teams use some flavour of Scrum where they keep track of their work in Azure DevOps, which we also use for our CI/CD

• Our cloud provider is Azure, where our microservices are hosted in Azure Kubernetes Services

• We are building a whole new set of microservices based on Event-Driven Architecture patterns

• We are a team of passionate product-focused engineers committed to building and fostering an environment where our employees feel value

Our Process

• Recruiter Screen

• 1st Stage Interview

• Technical Interview - take away home task, afterwards presented to the team

• Final Interview - Meeting senior members of the team

• Offer

What's in it for you

• Private health insurance (inpatient outpatient, maternity, eye care, dental and gym facilities)

• Group Life Cover and Personal Accident Cover

• Company pension (A mandatory basic national social security scheme)

• Remote working (dependent on the nature of the role)

• Airtime allowance (dependent on the nature of the role)

• MIFI monthly payment for remote workers

• 20 days per annum (excluding public holidays). Annual leave is accrued at the standard rate of 1.75 days per month

• Annual Learning and Development Fund - You have an annual $ 1,200 allowance to spend on learning and development (that is, between 1 January and 31 December). For your first year at M-KOPA, this allowance is pro-rated depending on the month that you start.

• Home Office Set Up - Having the best IT equipment tools in the world doesn't make sense if you do not have a proper setup to work with. For this reason, M-KOPA will pre-approve the following items for a total budget of $1000 that you can use at any time after signing the offer letter with M-KOPA (you may purchase desk and chair separately or together; before or after your start date)

• On site retreats with wider tech team, plus trips to operational markets