
Watu Credit
Banking + 2 more
Description
Who You Are
Essential
- 7+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 years leading engineering teams of 15+ people across multiple squads or product areas.
- Track record of shipping customer-facing products at scale, payments, mobile apps, messaging, or growth engineering in fintech, e-commerce, or a similarly high-velocity environment.
- Strong technical depth in backend engineering (APIs, event-driven architecture, distributed systems) and enough mobile/frontend fluency to govern Android squads and set standards.
- Experience with partner or vendor governance, you have been in situations where external teams execute work that your team owns, and you have made that work.
- Proven ability to build and develop engineering managers and Tech Leads, not just manage them, but grow them into genuine technical authorities.
- Comfortable operating in markets with limited infrastructure, you understand the constraints of building for mobile-first, low-bandwidth, emerging market customers.
- Fluent in modern engineering practices: trunk-based development, CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code thinking, security-first API design, test automation.
Responsibilities
Engineering leadership
- Set the technical direction for the customer experience engineering layer, architecture patterns, API design standards, code quality gates, and testing strategy.
- Build and manage a team of Tech Leads, hire them, develop them, hold them to a high bar. They are your primary lever for quality and velocity.
- Lead the QA Chapter model: work closely with the QA Chapter Lead to ensure consistent testing standards, automation coverage, and definition of done across all five squads.
- Own the release management process for CXE: coordinate cross-squad releases with your counterpart Head of Engineering, Platform, and own the CXE side of the Release Calendar.
Delivery and quality
- Drive delivery across five squads operating on Scrum or Kanban (your decision per squad), fast, predictable, and high quality.
- Work with existing dev outsourcing partners (when applicable) to define the long term strategy, nothing ships without Tech Lead sign-off. You are accountable for making this governance real.
- Enforce the engineering standards: GitHub for all code, GitHub Actions for CI/CD, mandatory PR reviews, coverage gates, OpenAPI documentation, ADRs, runbooks.
- Own the Definition of Done for your function. QA is embedded in every squad. not a bottleneck at the end of a sprint.
People and culture
- Build the CXE engineering culture: high ownership, direct communication, AI-native ways of working. Every engineer in your function uses AI/LLM tooling as a standard part of their workflow.
- Hire into your function, Tech Leads first, then engineers. You will define the hiring bar and conduct final interviews for senior hires.
- Work closely with three Heads of Product (Digital Experience, Onboarding & Operations), you own How and When; they own What. This partnership must be strong.
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