Senior Software Engineering Manager

Job Title: Senior Software Engineering Manager

Location: Nairobi, Kenya

Reports to: Chief Technology Officer

The Senior Software Engineering Manager is a key leader responsible for managing a team of software engineers, shaping the technical strategy, and providing architectural oversight for our mission-critical lending, data, and customer value platform. This role balances people management with deep technical expertise, ensuring the team delivers robust, highly scalable, and secure solutions that align with the company’s strategic goals.

Main Objectives & Responsibilities:

• Team Leadership & People Management: Lead, mentor, and develop a high-performing team of software engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence, accountability, and continuous improvement.
• Technical Strategy & Architectural Oversight: Define and drive the technical roadmap for the backend platform, ensuring architectural decisions promote scalability, security, and maintainability across all event-driven services built with Java, Spring Boot, and Clojure.
• Engineering Excellence & Delivery: Champion the adoption and rigorous application of engineering best practices, including Test-Driven Development (TDD), secure software development practices, clean code principles, and efficient CI/CD processes, to ensure predictable and high-quality feature delivery.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Collaborate strategically with product managers, QA and platform engineers, and other business functions to translate complex product and technology vision into clear technical execution approaches and successfully delivered features.

Contribution & Impact:

This role is critical for scaling the engineering organization and our core platform. Your leadership will directly result in a more productive and skilled engineering team, a resilient and high-performing core infrastructure, and a significantly improved velocity for delivering new, market-driving business capabilities to our customers. Sustained stability in the core Java and Clojure platform and the strategic adoption of new technologies and approaches such as AI, will be key measures of success.

• Help your team deeply understand business, customer, and partner needs, translating them into thoughtful technical and product decisions.
• Promote a culture of ownership, accountability, and high standards, enabling your team to move quickly and deliver meaningful results.
• Support engineers in their growth and development by conducting regular one-on-ones, performance reviews, and career development discussions.
• Drive hiring, onboarding, and training of new engineering talent.

Technical Strategy & Architectural Roadmapping

• Partner with senior engineers, solution architects and principal engineers to shape and execute on the technical strategy for your area.
• Guide the architectural evolution of services, event-driven systems (Kafka/RabbitMQ), and data pipelines at scale.
• Define technology standards, development methodologies, and security best practices for the team.

Engineering Excellence and Quality Assurance

• Contribute to Ezra’s engineering culture, helping shape how we build great software and work together effectively.
• Instill Test-Driven Development (TDD), ensuring all features are accompanied by comprehensive unit, integration, and end-to-end tests.
• Oversee software design, development, and code review processes and set a high bar for code quality, maintainability, and security.
• Implement and foster secure software design and development approaches that minimize the attack surface and associated risk.

Delivery Management and Performance Optimization

• Manage the execution of the engineering roadmap, working with product managers to prioritise and scope features.
• Monitor system performance and stability, providing guidance to the team on profiling, load testing, and implementing effective caching/performance tuning strategies.
• Collaborate with platform engineering to streamline CI/CD pipelines, optimize deployment strategies, and ensure operational excellence.

Hands-on Software Development

• Contribute directly to production code, staying close to the work and building knowledge & context through first-hand experience.
• Utilise AI-enabled software development practices, acting as a role model for software engineers and demonstrating the state of the possible.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
• 8+ years of professional experience in software development, with 3+ years in a management or leadership role overseeing a team of 5 or more engineers.
• Strong technical background and deep proficiency in Java and Spring Boot.
• Proven expertise in architectural design and operation of event-driven microservices architectures at scale.
• Demonstrated ability to drive and enforce Test-Driven Development (TDD) methodologies and clean code principles.
• Solid experience with message brokers/queues (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ) and robust data store management (NoSQL/Relational databases, Redis).
• Working experience with CI/CD pipelines, DevOps practices, and version control (Git).
• Exceptional leadership, communication, and interpersonal skills, with a track record of successfully mentoring and developing engineering talent.

• Hands-on experience or architectural oversight in Clojure or other functional programming languages.
• Proven experience managing teams working with Docker and Kubernetes in a production environment.
• Extensive experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) for deploying and scaling high-volume services.
• Familiarity with monitoring and observability tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack).
• Knowledge of serverless computing environments.

• Is an architectural driver: Functions as a self-driven leader who owns projects end-to-end, from initial design to robust production-ready deployment.
• Is a strategic leader: Functions as a visionary leader, capable of defining and communicating a clear technical roadmap that aligns with Ezra’s mission to provide digital lending solutions.
• Builds and develops teams: Excels at hiring, mentoring, and retaining top engineering talent, setting clear expectations, and fostering a high-trust, high-performance team culture.
• Drives architectural excellence: Possesses the deep technical knowledge to guide and approve complex architectural designs, ensuring scalability, resilience, and security.
• Ensures flawless execution: Proactively manages project delivery, removes roadblocks for their team, and is accountable for the timely and high-quality delivery and deployment of features.
• Champions quality: Is a passionate advocate for engineering best practices, driving Test-Driven Development (TDD) and clean and secure code.
• Embraces evolution: Stays current with industry trends, strategically integrating new technologies like AI and cloud-native tools while ensuring stability in the core platform.

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.