Engineering Manager

We are the leading data and tech-driven food distribution company in Tanzania aiming at boosting access to digital commerce for 10,000+ retailers and businesses in Africa. We are a fast-growing Series B startup with 300+ team members committed to sustainability and food innovation. We are lean in execution, results driven and speed to market. We embrace a lean approach, prioritizing results and maintaining a strong focus on speed and efficiency to deliver go-to-market solutions.

What we are looking for

About The Team:

We are establishing an on-site engineering team in Dar-es-Salaam, and you will be in charge of building and establishing this team while continuing management of our remote teams. Key projects include: Farmer management system (FMS), distribution management system (DMS), and ERP. We follow an agile, scrum-based process, and you will be working in close collaboration within a squad alongside the Product Manager and UI/UX Designer.

About The Role:

We are seeking an experienced and results-driven Engineering Manager to build, lead, and grow our 25+ technical engineering teams. Your primary focus is to drive innovative and scalable products from concept to launch and operations; own systems & integrations, lead architecture, software development, prioritization, and delivery based on business goals & objectives. This role requires strong leadership skills, technical expertise, and a commitment to fostering innovation and team growth to ensure speed in delivering go-to-market solutions.

An additional key focus area is on the people you leadguiding them, nurturing their growth, and ensuring they have everything they need to succeed. While you're technically credible and understand the details of the work being done, your role is about empowering a world-class engineering team, fostering their health, and driving delivery on product commitments.

What does the job involve

Team Development & Leadership

• Hire and align 3 high-performing teams of engineers into defined roles with ongoing refinement of team charter and mission.
• Mentor and develop the team through regular 1:1s, providing coaching and promoting a healthy engineering culture, and managing individual performance to foster engineering excellence and career development.
• Guide the team in adopting best practices in software development, testing, and deployment, and managing cross-team dependencies, milestone planning, resource allocation and risk management.
• Foster a culture of continuous learning and growth within the engineering team.

Technical Competencies

• Develop and execute a robust technical strategy that encompasses development methodologies like agile and scrum, systems architecture, and extensive use of AWS.
• Lead and review systems architecture, ensuring best practices in code quality, designs, managing technical debt, and implementing effective APIs and eventing strategies to ensure scalability, security, reliability, and efficiency.
• Oversee the migration strategies from common third-party platforms to in-house solutions, ensuring seamless transition and integration.
• Drive business impact by aligning engineering teams to iteratively deliver functionality with tight feedback loops.

Collaboration and Stakeholder Management

• Define architecture vision and coordinate stakeholder requests and customer needs into product solutions; complete with feedback loops, adoption plans, and collaborate on measured business impact projections.
• Work closely with cross-functional teams (e.g., Product, Design, QA, and DevOps) to align on delivery priorities and objectives.
• Lead project planning activities including sprint planning, resource allocation, setting timelines, budgeting, managing cross-team dependencies, and risk management.
• Ensure the delivery of projects on time and within budget, while managing the technical and business risks.
• Communicate progress, challenges, and solutions to stakeholders and leadership.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in computer science, software engineering, or a related field.
• 8+ years of software development experience, with 3+ years managing technical teams delivering on business initiatives and architecture
• Demonstrated leadership of one or more engineering teams in different size organizations from startup to scaled big tech to deliver initiatives and architecture.
• Proven experience leading the design, feature prioritization, implementation, and deployment of complex, large-scale, engineering projects through managing multi platform engineering teams, preferably in a hyper growth stage company.
• Experience working in a fast-paced, cross-functional team environment, collaborating closely with designers, product managers and operations stakeholders.
• Demonstrated software management skills including design, feature prioritization, operations, successful deployment and release management of B2B software products.
• Strong understanding of software development lifecycle (SDLC) and agile methodologies.
• Experience in hiring, development, and management of experienced and junior software engineers
• Exceptional leadership, communication, and organizational skills with the ability to inspire and motivate teams.
• Ability to manage multiple workstreams priorities in a fast-paced environment.
• Proficiency in relevant tools like JIRA, Git, CI/CD pipelines.
• Ability to communicate effectively via written or spoken communication with both technical and non-technical team members from front line contributors to C-level leaders.

Preferred Skills:

• Your focus will primarily be on reviewing PRs rather than writing code; think about systems, services, and reviewing high quality code. Languages can be learned, we care much more about your general engineering skill than knowledge of a particular language or framework. Its not expected that any single candidate would have expertise across all of these areas.
• Our stack includes;
  • Node, Django, React, Flutter, ERPNext (Frappe)
  • Firebase, Mapbox
  • AWS
  • Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket
• Comfortable with monolith and distributed system architectures.

Our Hiring Process

We aim to go through the initial interview to offer stage in 3-4 weeks:

• 1st interview: Screening call with the People and Culture Manager
• 2nd interview: Technical interview - home assignment and system design
• 3rd interview: Culture interview with a senior management panel
• Offer stage

Benefits

• Housing in Dar es Salam, Tanzania
• Full support for visa/work permit and relocation
• Health & life insurance
• Paid time off - 28 days a year
• Annual return trip flight back home

Location

Onsite - Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Open to candidates globally, willing to relocate to Dar es Salaam.

Non-Negotiables

• 8+ years of software development experience, with 3+ years managing technical teams delivering on business initiatives and architecture.
• Demonstrated leadership of one or more engineering teams in different size organizations; from startups to scaled big tech to deliver initiatives and architecture.
• Proven experience leading the design, feature prioritization, implementation, and deployment of complex, large-scale, engineering projects through managing multi platform engineering teams, preferably in a hyper growth stage company.
• Experience in hiring, development, and management of experienced and junior software engineers.
• Open to candidates globally, willing to relocate to Dar es Salaam.

Place of work