Job description

This is a senior Android engineering position on M-KOPA’s mobile engineering team. You will be responsible for designing, developing, and maintaining M-KOPA’s Android products for device locking and M-KOPA customer help, support, and enablement. You will also be jointly responsible for supporting the team in CI/CD and DevOps practices.

Alongside the Android team you will be using a variety of technologies/patterns in your day to day. These include, LiveData, MVVM, Koin, Coroutines, Spek, dynamic feature delivery, feature toggles, Docker, and Azure DevOps.

As part of the Android team you'll be responsible for bringing our core products to Android. You will use your in-depth knowledge of all things Android to craft new M-KOPA features that are uniquely Android-based. Key activities for our team are:

1. Architecting new device locking solutions as we partner with new operators and OEMs
2. Handling mobile money transactions through in app features
3. Enabling our sales force to on board customers easily and securely
4. Advocating the best in Android UX to enable customers to have an Android first experience

Requirements

• Excellent programming skills in an object-oriented language like Java or Kotlin, and a curiosity for learning
• Experience implementing new features and optimizing existing ones
• Technical depth that allows you to rapidly fix bugs and solve problems
• Experience working closely across a variety of teams including product management, interaction design, customer care, and engineering
• A detailed approach to writing tests and quality assurance
• Pragmatism in the face of deadlines and change
• An eye for automation, to get stuck in and do what is necessary for the smooth operation of the team (then automate it)
• Any experience or knowledge of AOSP and Android at the framework level is a plus
• Experience of network/bandwidth constrained environments, example being the East African market, is a plus
• A degree in computer science or a related field, or equivalent experience/learning. (We care much more about your skills than about how you acquired them)
• At least 4+ years of experience working with Android.

Engineering at M-KOPA

M-KOPA runs a highly collaborative engineering team; in doing so we also do everything that we can to maintain high standards for architecture, implementation, and process.

Our goal is to:

Ship reliable services that help our users improve their lives and that are easy to integrate and maintain as we grow both our business and our engineering team; in parallel, we also want to foster a friendly and open engineering team that gives all team members opportunities to learn and grow. We try to achieve these objectives in a way that is supportive, participatory, and continuously open to change.

M-KOPA’s engineering team was already fully remote pre-Covid and will remain fully remote even once the pandemic situation resolves and office life returns. It is a requirement that tech employees are geographically based within +/- 3h of the East African Timezone.

M-KOPA strives to create a team environment that provides opportunities for synchronous collaboration when beneficial (this is why we keep a relatively narrow timezone range for all of our employees) but that also benefits from asynchronous written collaboration when we consider it to be helpful for reducing context-switching and preserving focus. We currently do not do any face-to-face collaboration but that will start up occasionally (e.g. 1-2 times per year, likely in rotating locations in Europe) following the resolution of the Covid situation.

Remote employees who are interested are also able to travel to our markets in Kenya, Uganda, or Nigeria at least once per year to interact with customers and with our commercial teams (again, post-Covid).

As a remote-first team we put significant emphasis on employee well-being and balance. While M-KOPA engineers are dedicated and hard-working, overtime work is rare - restricted mostly to production incidents or occasional out-of-hours deployments, both of which are compensated with commensurate time-off. We want our engineering team to be rested, motivated, and happy in their lives both inside and outside of M-KOPA.