Jobs at Kyosk Digital Services

Job Description

• As a Software Engineering Manager, you’ll join our growing team of Product and Technology professionals who share a passion for leveraging technology to empower informal retailers across the African continent.
• You’ll work with teams from multiple countries across the organization to imagine and build innovative solutions for Kyosk’s customers and internal teams.
• To be successful in this role you will need to be a great communicator, innovator, influencer, and an analytical problem solver.
• You will need to think and act fast, deal with ambiguity and constraints, and help to develop ideas into products that work on a global scale.

Key Responsibilities

• Leadership: Be the leader who your team looks up to. Improve processes to make your team more effective. Develop knowledge and domain expertise. Take ownership of what you and the team build and coordinate efforts across the team to ensure efficient completion of tasks. Eliminate obstacles that prevent your team from performing optimally.
• People Management: Actively seek to build a great team. Ensure effective recruitment, training and development programs are adopted to promote productivity, retention, motivation and morale. Manage the career path and goals of your team members, conducting regular 1-on-1s and having monthly performance dialogues. Review candidate profiles and conduct interviews keeping Kyosk’s growth and culture objectives in mind.
• Performance Management: Set and review performance and development goals for your team. Identify timeframes and readiness for promotion of direct reports; solicit cross functional feedback in support of promotions and employee rewards. Coach and mentor engineers, showing them the next steps in their careers. Craft a winning culture built on collaboration and shared accomplishments while having fun along the way.
• Capacity Planning: Establish staffing needs and a hiring strategy by working collaboratively with the broader Product and Technology management team. Balance the size and composition of your teams against the expected deliverables while ensuring optimal team performance.
• Strategic Thinking: Plan and execute long term strategies that benefit the team and their product(s). Work with a Product Manager and Tech Lead to ensure that the roadmap is realistic and clearly understood by the team. 
• Technical Delivery: Take ownership of the progress, costs, and quality of delivering engineering outcomes. Adopt, enforce, and contribute to the agile processes that define Kyosk’s way of working to deliver multiple product releases at scale. Own and refine the processes that your team uses to build and support products within the business. 
• Technical Monitoring: Build a deep understanding of how our products work and are built. Though you will not be expected to code regularly or at all, you need to grasp code and architecture concerns. Identify and track metrics that can be used to ensure objectives are met and recommend process improvements. Understand engineering metrics and seek to improve them.
• Process Improvement: Regularly monitor, determine and recommend methods to streamline and improve development processes and procedures. Spearhead various research and development initiatives to identify opportunities for new projects and improved processes.
• Stakeholder Management: Prepare and deliver various engineering-related presentations, both internally and externally. Act as the point of contact with the business and technical leadership communicating their priorities to the team and vice versa.

Minimum Requirements & Key Skills:

• 7+ years of software development or technical product management experience with the full software development life-cycle: design, coding, testing, mocking, deployment and maintenance of software to real production environments;
• 3+ years as a manager with people management responsibilities and a track record of hiring and growing a talented team of engineers;
• Experience working with Agile methodologies, Scrum and demonstrated experience in managing end-to-end software development lifecycles.
• Proficiency with tools of the product and engineering trade such as Issue Tracking, Wikis, Diagramming, Roadmapping, Project Management, CI/CD, etc.
• The ability to align people behind a common goal. You can explain and materialize objectives of the team;
• Working knowledge of large-scale service-oriented infrastructure and the design of scalable, highly available systems in the real world;
• Strong overall knowledge of development and quality assurance methodologies;
• Ability to successfully collaborate with multiple technical functions in the areas of infrastructure, devops, architects and other software engineers;
• Outstanding organizational, communication, interpersonal and relationship building skills

Desired Technical Competencies

• Conversational knowledge of modern programming language and frameworks like Java, Angular, C++, Android, Python, etc;
• Experience organizing, leading, and growing an engineering team or organization from scratch preferred;
• Experience in e-commerce, payments, and/or distribution of FMCG products is a plus
• Exposure to micro services, Kubernetes/Docker, and GCP/AWS services strongly preferred;
• You’ve worked with 3rd parties to integrate and scale products and services for rapid product growth.
• You have a genuine knack for numbers and how they are represented, and you are super comfortable with Excel and/or Google Sheets.

Desired Behavioral Competencies

• You have experience in handling the pressure of fast-paced environments typical of a tech startup environment where you wear multiple hats and have access to limited resources 
• You have a strong desire for continuous improvement
• You can work under pressure, with tight timelines and ambitious deadlines
• You have a passion for digital products 
• You can stay motivated through difficult challenges, and occasional long hours
• Your passion is contagious, and you use it to inspire the rest of the team
• You have equal empathy for internal users, and our target market of informal retailers
• You have a strong work ethic and exhibit genuine care for the team and their products, with a willingness to go to any necessary length to ensure their success
• You have integrity: You do what you say you will do and make no excuses. 
• You develop a deep understanding and respect for what each team member is responsible for, and trust them to do their job
• Your confidence and experience make you trust your instinct and communicate persuasively. You know when to make decisions (even when others might disagree) vs when to build consensus, and you can articulate the strategy and business rationale behind your decisions.
• You are comfortable taking the blame if something goes wrong, and equally quick to give credit to the rest of the team when it goes well
• You are detail-oriented, process-driven, and organized, and can stay two steps ahead of the work your team is doing
• You understand devops as culture not as a role, and seek to automate manual processes where it makes sense.

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Key Responsibilities:

• Business Unit Performance: Responsible for P&L management for the warehouse and market while driving profit maximization for the business unit. Oversee the business unit performance management and ensure the attainment of all organizational KPIs for the unit. Account for any performance decline and devise ways to improve the same.
• Revenue Generation: Work collaboratively with the commercial and purchasing teams to spearhead revenue generation in the market including advisory on product pricing to generate business margins. Liaise with the sales team to drive product penetration and uptake in the market including the formulation of effective sales and marketing strategies.
• Strategy Execution: Communication of the business strategy in the market and ensuring execution against the set KPIs as per the strategy. Ensure the team understands and buys into the strategy. Support the development of the pricing strategy and product pricing based on market understanding, competitor analysis, and customer feedback.
• Operations Optimization: Lead the coordination of business activities with the head office and collaborate with Functional Managers to guarantee operational efficiency. Proactively support the development and review of SOPs based on the gaps identified to maximize operations effectiveness.
• Inventory Management: Work closely with the Warehouse Supervisor and Loss Control Supervisor to facilitate proper inventory management, stock control, and loss prevention. Collaboratively formulate and implement measures to safeguard the inventory in the warehouse.
• Compliance: Drive compliance to the laid down SOPs for the warehouse, operations, and HR whilst ensuring proper team training and appreciation. Ensure legislative and regulatory compliance of the business unit including Health and safety compliance of the business unit. Undertake frequent operations audits to evaluate the level of compliance, operational gaps, and hindrances for immediate action.
• Budget Management: Develop and present the annual budget for the specific business unit; Monitor and oversee its utilization including budget control, accounting as well as reconciliation.
• Market Intelligence & Business Advisory: Undertake frequent market surveys and analyses to identify opportunities the business can capitalize on, understand competitor activities, and appreciate customer dynamics. Escalate customer feedback to the management to ensure course correction where necessary.
• People Management: Support staff recruiting for the business unit, training, supervision, and appraising of staff. Work closely with the HR team to execute key HR functions in the unit including policy implementation, performance management, disciplinary, evaluations, and training.

Minimum Requirements & Key Skills:

• A Diploma in Business Management or a related field. A Bachelor’s degree will be an added advantage;
• A minimum of 4-6 years in operations management and driving business performance in a retail or FMCG background.
• Experience handling end-to-end operations cutting across warehousing, logistics, sales, and business performance management is preferred;
• Appreciation of the business environment, key priorities, and a keen sense of what needs to be done for the business to succeed;
• Proven ability to manage cross-functional teams with indirect reporting lines to drive the execution and achievement of business objectives and strategy.

Competencies & Skills

• Strong Commercial Acumen
• Operational Excellence
• Team Player
• People Management
• Stakeholder Engagement