Senior/ Lead Full Stack Engineer

Senior/Lead Full Stack Engineer

(NodeJS, React Native & MongoDB)

Anticipated start: April 2023

Location:  Remote (South Africa, Kenya, Ghana)

Team: Product Team

Instill’s mission is to transform teaching, learning and leadership in every classroom on the African continent. We believe that the greatest levers for change in the education system are teachers and school leaders. We have recently been accredited as a higher education institution in South Africa, and are launching Upskill, a mobile-first learning platform to support teachers in their ongoing professional development. Following an MVP built externally we are now building our own engineering team. We’re looking for an experienced Lead/ Senior Engineer  to join our small and growing team to ensure the success of our online learning platform. As our first internal software engineer, reporting to our CTO, this will be a great opportunity to help shape the future of our engineering team and technology platform.

What makes you a great candidate?

You are an experienced (7+ years) software engineer who is ambitious, eager to learn and has a passion for education. You enjoy working in a fast-paced business environment and are looking grow with a young organisation that seeks to change the face of education across the African continent. You enjoy developing mobile applications with a cloud-based serverless backend, using serverless NodeJS, React Native and MongoDB. You are well-organised and you bring experience in leading a small team of software engineers by example. You are equally comfortable to step back, dig into code and just get work done together with your colleagues. You want to learn how a start-up works and are excited by the challenge of immersing yourself in new contexts and tackling complex problems. You are not afraid of failure and are driven to improve through robust, data-driven decision making and feedback.

When evaluating your candidacy, beyond your engineering skills we will look for the following:

• Demonstrated commitment to anti-racism, equity, and inclusion
• You have the ambition to grow with the business and move into leadership positions
• You are a critical thinker with strong interpersonal communication skills
• You have a demonstrated passion for educational development, closing educational equity gaps, and are strongly aligned with our vision, mission and values

What does role entail?

As a Lead or Senior Software Engineer, you will be working with our Product Team and our CTO to evolve, further build and develop as well as operate our mobile-first learning platform , providing engaging, interactive learning experiences.

This includes:

• Developing, maintaining and operating our platform, initially with our 3rd party supplier’s software engineers.
• Leading the implementation of new features in close cooperation with our product team
• Ensuring high code and architectural quality and suggesting improvements where appropriate.
• Ensuring high level of test coverage.
• Working closely with our CTO to define technical and cloud architecture and technical design
• Responsibility and accountability for a scalable and maintainable technology platform.
• Helping us build our first in-house engineering team and leading that team by example.
• Providing technical and feasibility estimates into the product development process.
• Managing the sprint backlog together with the product owner.
• Caring about the platform quality end-2-end, from first lines of code to running it in the cloud.

Required Skills & Experience:

• Good working knowledge of at least 2 programming languages
• 7+ years of commercial software engineering experience writing code in a major programming language (JavaScript, Dotnet, Java, Python, etc)
• 5+ years of commercial experience writing server-side JavaScript (NodeJS / serverless)
• 3+ years of experience with a Tier 1 cloud environment (AWS, GCP or Azure)
• 3+ years of experience with JavaScript frontend development.
• 2+ years of experience working with MongoDB and good knowledge of Mongo design pitfalls
• 2+ years of experience with React / React Native
• 3+ years of experience leading a small team as a team lead or tech lead.
• Experience of working with product owners / product managers in an agile environment
• Experience working in a SCRUM as well as a KANBAN process.

Selection Criteria:

• You are highly professional, organised, and reliable
• You put our end users first and are able to make recommendations that improve the student experience
• You have a track record in managing your time effectively to complete work on time and according to standards
• You are detail oriented and have a high level of quality
• Ability to communicate effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Passionate about digitally-enabled learning and eager to grow and learn
• You take initiative and are proactive in your engagements, raising risks early
• You are comfortable working in a high speed environment and are flexible and can adapt quickly to change
• You have the ability to work effectively in a multicultural and geographically dispersed team
• Familiarity with the Content Authoring or LMS tools is useful
• You have  an ability and desire to learn and master new software tools easily

Do our values resonate with yours?

We measure the impact of everything we do.

We believe that education equity is a central pillar of achieving social justice.

We pursue excellence in everything that we do.

We have the courage to make bold decisions and learn from our mistakes.

We build community by being accountable for our actions, fostering collaborative environments, and acting with integrity and humility.

We believe that diversity is central to our success.