Job Title: Director, Software Engineering

Location: Nairobi, Kenya

Reports to: Chief Technology Officer

About the role:

The Director of Engineering is a senior leadership position responsible for the overall strategy, operation, and growth of the software engineering organisation. This role leads a team of engineering managers and very senior individual contributors, ensuring the department delivers robust, scalable, and secure solutions that align with Ezra’s broader business strategy. You will set the cultural tone for the organisation, lead the development of software strategy, drive organisation-wide technical roadmaps, and serve as a key partner to product, PMO, operations and executive leadership.

Contribution & Impact:

This role is critical to the scalability and maturity of the engineering organisation. Your leadership will define the standard of excellence across the engineering function, foster high-performing teams, and ensure that our core systems and platform keep pace with Ezra’s growth. Key measures of success include the successful delivery of complex cross-team programmes, the growth and retention of engineering talent, the reduction of systemic technical debt, and the successful execution of a long-term technology vision that supports our aggressive expansion and innovation goals.

Key responsibilities:

1. Organisational Leadership and People Development

• Build, lead, and mentor a high-performing organisation of software engineers, managers, and technical leads.
• Foster a culture of inclusive leadership, ownership, and high performance, ensuring that career development, performance management, and succession planning are prioritised at all levels.
• Drive the organisational hiring strategy, scaling the team efficiently while maintaining a high quality bar.
• Act as a coach to engineering managers and individual engineers, helping them navigate complex people, project, and technical challenges.

1. Engineering Strategy & Execution

• Define and communicate the technical vision for the software engineering organisation, ensuring alignment with our technology strategy.
• Oversee the execution of the multi-team engineering roadmap, ensuring consistency and high standards in delivery, quality, and velocity.
• Partner with the CTO, Technical Delivery, and Product leadership to translate business objectives into actionable technical strategy.
• Drive standardisation across teams, including technology stack choices, architectural patterns, and development methodologies (e.g., TDD).

1. Operational Excellence and Governance

• Establish and enforce organisational standards for system reliability, security, and performance.
• Proactively identify systemic delivery bottlenecks and implement process improvements to increase engineering efficiency.
• Drive operational excellence across the engineering organisation that ensures escalated incidents and operational challenges are addressed quickly and in a highly collaborative manner.
• Champion security and compliance, ensuring that 'security by design' is embedded in the organisational culture.

1. Cross-Functional Partnership

• Act as a primary liaison between the engineering function and other business functions (Product, Data, Operations, Commercial) to ensure clear communication and shared objectives.
• Influence product and programme strategy by providing insights into technical feasibility, trade-offs, and innovation opportunities.
• Represent the engineering organisation in executive forums, reporting on progress, risks, and strategic initiatives.
• Technical Innovation
• Stay at the forefront of industry trends, proactively identifying opportunities to leverage AI, cloud-native tools, and emerging patterns to gain a competitive advantage.
• Drive the adoption of advanced engineering practices that improve system resilience and developer productivity.

Qualifications and Experience:

• Bachelor's or master’s degree in computer science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
• 12+ years of professional experience in software development, with 5+ years in a senior leadership role overseeing other managers and large engineering teams.
• Proven track record of scaling engineering organisations in a high-growth, fast-paced environment.
• Strong technical background with the ability to provide architectural guidance on distributed systems, event-driven architectures, and cloud-native services.
• Expert-level understanding of software development lifecycles, Agile/Lean methodologies, and engineering governance.
• Executive presence, with the ability to influence stakeholders at all levels of the organisation.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience managing distributed teams across multiple geographies 
• Experience designing, building, and operations high-transactions systems.
• Experience in the FinTech or regulated financial services sector.
• Proven experience managing teams working with containerisation and cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) for deploying and scaling high-volume services.
• Familiarity with monitoring and observability tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack).

The ideal candidate is someone who:

• Is a multiplier: Focuses on building systems and processes that enable other leaders to succeed.
• Is a strategic visionary: Can balance immediate operational needs with thelong-term technical vision required to scale the business.
• Leads with empathy and accountability: Builds high-trust environments where team members feel supported, yet holds the organisation to high standards 
• Navigates complexity: Expertly balances technical debt, feature velocity, and business stability in a large-scale, mission-critical environment.
• Communicates with clarity: Translates complex technical challenges into clear, actionable business language for non-technical stakeholders.
• Champions quality: Is a passionate advocate for engineering best practices, driving Test-Driven Development (TDD) and clean and secure code.

Company overview:

Ezra provides B2B digital lending solutions for emerging markets in partnership with mobile and digital wallet operators and financial service providers. Ezra supports 24 operations in 23 countries, across Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Our key office locations are in Nairobi, Kenya and Dubai, UAE.

Our flagship products are Airtime Credit Services (ACS), Nano and BNPL.

• ACS is an airtime or data advance offered to prepaid mobile subscribers at the point of low credit.
• Nano is a micro cash advance offered to mobile wallet users on demand.
• BNPL facilitates payment installments for products and services

As a FinTech company, our business is entirely technology and data driven, from determining subscriber eligibility, generating relevant offers, managing risk, loan issuance, recovery, optimizing performance and reporting, reconciliation and billing. Each day we process approximately 21M loan requests and 1.4 TB of data across our markets. This process needs to be robust, reliable and secure. But it doesn’t end there. We’re exploring new ways of using our platform and transactional data to improve our products and develop new product opportunities