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. 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. Requirements: Qualifications and Experience: 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. Preferred Qualifications: 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. The ideal candidate is someone who: 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.