Job Vacancies at Okra

The Role

• It’s an amazing time to join Okra. We are looking for a Technical Product Manager who will be responsible for making sure our Core Infrastructure products are market leaders across every country in Africa.
• You will be responsible for delivering high quality integrations with banks as well as discovering and building country specific features that make our products stand out from the crowd.
• Your work will allow our Core Infrastructure team to quickly build reliable, stable products.
• We want our Product Managers to be passionate about solving problems with exceptionally high analytical quality, as we continue in our journey to digitise financial services for Africa.

Responsibilities
The successful candidate will:

• Work closely with teams across Okra to build the services that enable them to deliver new products.
• Be responsible for delivering the solutions that are essential to Okra scaling to meet its ever growing customer base.
• Work with your engineering counterparts to ensure what you build is stable and reliable now and into the future.
• Continuously strive for better quality products by prioritising team activities such as testing, alerting and observability.

Qualifications

• Experience working in FinTech or Financial Services is a bonus.
• Any previous work in a SaaS company, specifically specialising in APIs is a bonus.
• Are excited by the idea of other teams at Okra being your customers.
• Have technical product management experience in a Product-first, B2B company.
• Have experience working with a digital product used by a technical user base such as PaaS - this could also include APIs, SaaS.
• Have experience working with a product integrated with multiple endpoints - e.g., communications APIs, financial data APIs.
• Can act on data without relying on the complete picture to be built for them; prioritisation is your strength, and you have the ability to win consensus for your ideas amongst your stakeholders.
• Can strike the perfect balance between strategic visionary and tactical operator.
• Are customer-focused; everything you do, you do it to create a platform that our clients love to use.
• Would consider themselves a “people-person” - equally comfortable gathering user feedback, presenting your ideas to engineers or reporting your KPIs back to your product team - communication is key.
• Enjoy working cross-functionally with people from all over the world. Our ambitions are global, and so is the exceptional team we’ve built.
• Can coordinate and successfully deliver large cross-functional technical initiatives.

Nice to haves:

• Specific experience working with a financial product.
• Experience working with microservices in a cloud environment.
• Ability to understand complex technical/process challenges and then work with your engineers to solve them.
• Experience working in a technical role - maybe as an ex-developer.
• Start-up experience.

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The Role

• It’s an amazing time to join Okra. Our Engineering team is responsible for building tools and infrastructure to gather, analyze, and visualize financial data.
• We believe the way millions of people interact with their finances will change over time, and our Engineering team will be at the forefront of creating that experience. 
• You’ll be the person helping us achieve this vision.
• Your focus will be to grow our Core Services team, and partner with our product managers and engineers to build and maintain our core services.
• This is a most mission-critical component of our infrastructure.
• You’ll work closely with the Head of Engineering and our CEO/CTO to build an organisational structure and processes that scale as we continue to grow. 

Responsibilities
The successful candidate will:

• Recruit, grow, and enable an incredible team of driven engineers who have high expectations around craft, ownership and impact. 
• Fostering a collaborative culture that embodies our principles and empowers users.
• Mentoring and developing your team of engineers; supporting their goal setting and career growth.
• Delivering world-class results, while continuously challenging yourself and your team to “make it better”.
• Working with other engineer managers and functional leads to set direction for your team, the engineering team, and Okra as a whole.
• Crafting a thoughtful, long-term technical strategy that anticipates future needs.

Requirements
What you’ll need: 

• Experience leading teams of 5 - 10 engineers. 
• Significant experience as a software engineer. 
• Willingness to roll your sleeves up and code when needed.
• Enterprise level MERN stack experience. 
• Passion for cultivating highly functioning teams and organizations. 
• A record of levelling up your reports and providing individuals with meaningful opportunities for growth. 
• Excitement for recruiting and a thoughtful approach to headcount planning. 
• Experience building teams during a hyper-growth phase is a huge plus.
• Experience leading remote and distributed teams.

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The Role

• It’s an amazing time to join Okra. Our Design team is responsible for delighting our customers and enhancing our end-user experience.
• We believe the way millions of people interact with their finances will change over time, and our design team will be at the forefront of driving those behaviors.
• You’ll be the individual helping us to achieve this vision.
• Your focus will be to execute world class product experiences as well as to help raise the bar of the Okra brand through cutting edge visual design solutions.

Responsibilities
The successful candidate will:

• Contribute to the overall product and brand development
• Work cross-functionally with engineering, product and business teams
• Understand scope, requirements, and drive innovative solutions aligned with business goals and metrics.
• Effectively apply research and data in design decisions
• Create flows, wireframes, prototypes and high fidelity visuals
• Work closely with engineers and other partners to ensure a high-quality implementation
• Use and evolve internal design systems
• Regularly talk to customers and users
• Regularly present work and share feedback with other designers
• Mentor and encourage growth amongst your design team
• Stay on top of the game by researching the latest trends in visual, UI, interaction design and provide recommendations for improvements.

Requirements
What you’ll need:

• 3 - 5 years experience creating and shipping digital products.
• A passion for design and figuring out best in class solutions to UX, UI, Visual design and interaction challenges
• Experience with design systems and scaling design across the whole company
• The ability to advocate for, and be a strong representative of design
• Proficiency in animation and illustration is a plus.
• Passionate about both brand and product verticals of design
• Excellent team player
• Effective written and verbal communication skills 
• Ability to think through complex design problems.

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The role

• It’s an amazing time to join Okra. As a Technical Support Engineer focused on helping Okra customers, you will support the architectural foundation for new products and explosive growth.
• You’ll collaborate with product managers, designers to understand user needs and to create delightful experiences for our customers, while setting the foundation to manage scale without compromising reliability.
• You will build on our current product and unlock a new way of managing money for the entire Fintech Industry. 

Responsibilities
The successful candidate will: 

• Build products with impact: your work will touch tens of millions of end users, the best applications in FinTech, and major financial institutions
• Understand the financial infrastructure in Africa today and be able to imagine the payments experience
• Challenge technical problems with non-deterministic solutions, diving into loosely defined problems and figuring out a path forward. 
• Prototype and develop new products. 
• Work cross-functionally and directly create a high business impact for Okra. 

Requirements
What you’ll need:

• 5+ years of experience in technical support, preferably in SaaS or API company.
• Experience with and passion for API's.
• Passion for customer support and helping customers.
• Deep understanding of networking and web sockets. 
• Experience with MongoDB or other NoSQL systems 
• Experience with Node.js and Typescript.

What we offer

• Fully remote work
• Competitive salary 
• Dynamic work environment 
• Be a part of the fintech revolution on the African continent.

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The Role

• It’s an amazing time to join Okra. We are looking for a seasoned leader to take our engineering organization to the next level.
• As the Head of Engineering, you’ll be responsible for driving excellent technical judgment and decision making that correctly anticipate future scalability and reliability challenges across a global engineering team consisting of our core infrastructure, data infrastructure, core services, core product, customer engineering, cloud infrastructure and QA teams.
• This highly strategic role will continually assess the needs of customers, and identify opportunities to develop world-class product development that enable greater personalisation of financial services.
• If you are a candidate who has the vision of what could be, who has the ability to cultivate relationships, deep technical and product expertise, and a belief in developing the skills and talents of others, then you may be the ideal person for this position and we would love to get to know you.

Responsibilities
The successful candidate will:

• Build and develop a high performing and elite team of leaders and engineers who have responsibility for engineering, implementing and maintaining our core infrastructure, data infrastructure, core services and core products. 
• Develop and own an infrastructure product strategy and roadmap that enables our customers to grow through innovation, efficiency, reliability and security in alignment with the company goals.
• Develop productive, collaborative, trusting cross-functional relationships with various groups including key stakeholders and team leads across Okra. 
• Determine, maintain, and regularly report on success metrics that measure the operational health, performance, effectiveness and efficiency of the products the team is responsible for delivering.
• Demonstrate hands-on technical depth that enables direct oversight, problem-solving leadership, and oversight of complex infrastructure implementation, system upgrades, software engineering principles and operational troubleshooting.
• Meaningfully shape future iterations of the Okra product 
• Ruthlessly prioritize workloads against available resources, level of impact, and desired business impact.
• Ensure launches are of the highest quality, can support mission-critical enterprise and consumer uses, and are delivered on time to meet stringent timelines
• Collaborate with the executive team to align on technology strategy and clearly communicate to stakeholders on the engineering vision, roadmap, and progress. 

Requirements
What will help you succeed:

• You will have seen what great looks like, you have led technology teams that have built products that are industry leading and you are known for raising the bar
• You have 10+ years of relevant experience including 5+ years of experience leading a 20+ engineering organization and leadership experience overseeing managers and directors
• 10+ years of overall technical experience, including deep technical knowledge of infrastructure management of diverse local- and cloud-based topologies with strong emphasis on cloud infrastructure
• You have a solid track rector of developing software products from inception to mass adoption
• Demonstrated ability to manage, motivate and hold accountable a high-performing, distributed team and can take advantage of talent across geographies - you are known as a talent magnet
• Demonstrated ability to set and guide engineering strategy in collaboration with product priorities and objectives
• Demonstrated ability to bring people together and motivate them to tackle a set of strategies and goals
• Experience leading within an infrastructure environment as well as consumer-grade applications. 
• 5+ years of experience of managing products, budgets, and justifying resource needs to senior leaders and finance partners.
• Prior experience and demonstrated success delivering technical solutions in high-growth environments with a proven track record of innovative thinking balanced with a strong customer and quality focus.
• A bias to action and execution, ability to operate in rigorous sprints, and fast productive cycles
• Forward-thinking strategist with proven success in translating strategy to tactical plans with high-quality execution and delivery, including the ability to get hands-on when developing systems architectures.

Nice to have: 

• Prior demonstrated experience being a catalyst for positive change and demonstrated ability to influence and be influenced, all within a global, fast-paced growth environment.
• A healthy skepticism for the status quo and an unwillingness to settle.
• An empathetic leadership style driven by strong self-awareness.