Job Description

At M-KOPA we are looking for an Engineering Manager to join our Portfolio Product group. This is a brand new role for 2024.

As one of Africaxe2x80x99s leading fintech lenders, M-KOPA issues millions of microloans to our customers every year. Each of these loans is based on a rigorous credit risk assessment. Each of these loans needs to be authoritatively tracked, with the results of that tracking aggregated into M-KOPAxe2x80x99s management accounting systems. In addition our overall lending portfolio needs to be continuously stress-tested and reforecasted, to ensure that it is evolving in-line with our expectations.

"The Portfolio Management product group at M-KOPA is responsible for all of these objectives".

Practically speaking this means that you will be responsible for directly managing multiple engineering teams to build and maintain transactional systems for core areas of loan management systems, while also working extremely closely with Data Scientists and Analytics Engineers to support our broader Portfolio Management work.
At M-KOPA we deploy multiple times per day, and you will be empowered to drive the architecture of our new fleet of microservices. We use predominantly C# written against the latest .NET stack, and favour microservices hosted on Azure using Kubernetes for all new implementations. We are constantly iterating towards a completely decoupled, event driven architecture across our entire software portfolio. As this is a people management role you should also have significant experience managing engineers and engineering strategy. Ultimately, the most important thing you can do in this role is to help keep your team engaged, supported, and aligned on a strong product strategy. In addition, as this position is very closely linked to our analytics engineering function, you should have a strong understanding of analytics engineering and dimensional modeling. That said, if you have strong data modeling skills but havenxe2x80x99t gone deep into analytics, donxe2x80x99t necessarily worry - as long as you have the interest in learning we can help you quickly level up in this area. Similarly, this position will involve integrating production code with machine learning models - a strong conceptual understanding of those types of integrations would be very helpful. These are fully remote roles, within the following time zone (UTC -1 / UTC+3). Our engineers work remotely from locations such as UK, Europe and Africa. You will be reporting to the group Engineering Manager. We have a mix of legacy services and greenfield microservices, so if you love the challenge of improving a legacy codebase while working on new projects, and if working remotely full time appeals, this might be a job for you.

We need someone proven in the coordination and management of multiple software teams working in an agile consumer focused product environment. They need to be comfortable articulating trade-offs between solutions and managing challenging customer driven stakeholders.

As noted in the introduction, this position focuses on tracking and managing M-KOPAxe2x80x99s loan portfolio. As a result, you will have the opportunity to develop (or refine ) deep domain expertise in consumer lending. Working closely with experts from our credit, product, and finance functions, by the end of your first year you will be expected to have built up substantial domain expertise with consumer lending, portfolio risk assessment, and management accounting. If this is exciting for you then great - that probably means youxe2x80x99re going to be a strong candidate! If itxe2x80x99s less exciting though then you may want to look at one of our other positions, as we have always felt that the best engineering leaders are those who also put significant effort into building domain expertise.

Flexible

Are you looking for an opportunity to work in a company where progress, and humility are valued as highly as technical excellence? Where we use the latest technologies and architectures to build fantastic customer experiences with a socially and environmentally conscious mission that echoes throughout the organisation. Our expectations are that you would be comfortable working as part of a team which owns the entire software stack, including the supporting infrastructure, throughout the entire software lifecycle from inception, through production and right the way to decommissioning under a DevOps culture. If you also value the constraints that continuous delivery places upon engineering processes and embrace testing and observability as first order concerns in the development of software, you probably have what it takes to join the team and shape our future.

Why M-KOPA?

Recognized twice by the Financial Times as one Africa's fastest growing company (2022 and 2023) and by TIME100 Most influential companies in the world 2023 , we've served over 3 million customers, unlocking $1 billion in cumulative credit for the unbanked across Africa. At M-KOPA, we empower our people to own their careers through diverse development programs, coaching partnerships, and on-the-job training. We support individual journeys with family-friendly policies, prioritize well-being, and embrace flexibility. Join us in shaping the future of M-KOPA as we grow together. Explore more at m-kopa.com. M-KOPA is an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer committed to assembling a diverse, broadly trained staff. Women, minorities, and people with disabilities are strongly encouraged to apply. M-KOPA explicitly prohibits the use of Forced or Child Labour and respects the rights of its employees to agree to terms and conditions of employment voluntarily, without coercion, and freely terminate their employment on appropriate notice. M-KOPA shall ensure that its Employees are of legal working age and shall comply with local laws for youth employment or student work, such as internships or apprenticeships. M-KOPA does not collect/charge any money as a pre-employment or post-employment requirement. This means that we never ask for xe2x80x98recruitment feesxe2x80x99, xe2x80x98processing feesxe2x80x99, xe2x80x98interview feesxe2x80x99, or any other kind of money in exchange for offer letters or interviews at any time during the hiring process.