Cellulant Group

ABOUT CELLULANT

Cellulant is a leading Pan African payments company that provides locally relevant and alternative payment methods for global, regional and local merchants. We provide a single API payments platform - Tingg - that enables businesses to collect payments online and offline while allowing anyone to pay from their mobile money, local and international cards, or directly from their bank.

Our Story

Founded in 2003, Cellulant has more than 18 years of experience in providing locally relevant payment solutions for businesses and their consumers.

Our evolution over the years, from a digital content business to mobile banking and now to payments has allowed us to build strong relationships and partnerships. We’ve taken our years of experience and assets acquired over the years to provide a payments platform in the continent that focuses on driving merchant business and digital payments for local, regional, and global merchants in the continent, and digitizing both online and offline payments.

Since 2003, the Cellulant team has learned, adapted and leveraged their experiences to pivot the business to become the leading payments provider in the continent.

You can read more about us and our Group leaders and Country Champions.

JOB TITLE:

Senior Engineering Manager: Release Engineering.

This role is location agnostic (Nairobi, Kenya, or Anywhere in Africa); however, a candidate’s home time zone will be relevant to success in the role (GMT –1 to +3 preferred).

JOB DESCRIPTION:

As a Senior Engineering Manager: Release Engineering, you will own the end-to-end delivery of our DevOps strategy and practice and the teams that deliver the rollout of the DevOps practices.

High-Level Requirements:

  • Leadership: Inspire collaboration and innovation.
  • Release Management: Orchestrate seamless release cycles.
  • Technical Proficiency: Strong background in software development and CI/CD.
  • Strategic Planning: Align releases with business objectives.
  • Communication: Collaborate effectively with teams and stakeholders.
  • Quality Assurance: Ensure software integrity and reliability.
  • Problem-Solving: Analyze and troubleshoot complex issues.
  • Project Management: Deliver releases on time and within scope.
  • Continuous Improvement: Drive efficiency gains and stay updated on best practices.
  • Risk Management: Identify and manage risks for smooth releases.

You will lead a cross-functional release team with one or more tech leads or senior engineering leads with a large impact production release pipeline, each with 3 - 7 engineers owning the entire lifecycle of a product release workflow.

CORE RESPONSIBILITIES:

  • Leadership: Led the team to develop end-to-end software products to help businesses from different verticals create a suite of payment products.
  • People Management: Actively seeking to build a great team and invests in effective training, coaching, process definition, mentorship, and career pathing for the larger team and have 1-1s and monthly performance check-ins with direct reports.
  • Performance management: Set and review performance development goals for the team members. Identifies the readiness for promotion for direct reports.
  • Capacity planning - establishes staffing needs and develops and executes a hiring plan in collaboration with the people team.
  • Strategic thinking - Plan and execute long-term strategies that benefit the team and product. Works with Product Managers, Designers, and other disciplines to explore the successive iterations of the product/set of assigned products.
  • Connect with other engineering teams directly to understand and develop solutions for their jobs to be done.
  • Process improvement: Identifies areas of process improvement and proposes the changes to streamline and drive improvements in development processes and procedures.

    QUALIFICATIONS & EXPERIENCE.

    • Bachelor's degree or Master's degree, Majoring in Computer Science or related fields.
    • Certifications in Release Management or DevOps Practices: Possession of relevant certifications, such as those in release management or DevOps practices, demonstrate a commitment to staying current with industry best practices and a depth of knowledge in the methodologies critical to the role of a Senior Engineering Manager in Release Engineering.
    • 5+ years of experience developing and shipping software products and/or services.
    • 3+ years as a team lead or manager of a cross-functional engineering team.
    • Hands-on solid systems design competencies and experience building channels(APIs, Messaging, and Chat products preferred)
    • Proven experience leading technical projects and delivering on ambitious goals.
    • Deep knowledge of engineering processes, the underlying principles, and tradeoffs.
    • Fluency in one or more general-purpose programming languages, including but not limited to: Golang, Python, Java, and C#.
    • Experience managing and deploying distributed systems for cloud-based micro-services architecture.
    • Experience working in a mature DevOps, SRE, or Modern Engineering organization supporting internet/hyper-scale services
    • Proven DevOps methodology experience.
    • Work experience with global release management: Previous experience managing software releases on a global scale, including coordination across diverse time zones, cultural considerations, and localization requirements.
    • Work experience with DevOps Integration: Demonstrated success in integrating Release Engineering processes seamlessly into a DevOps culture, fostering collaboration between development and operations teams to achieve continuous improvement and streamlined workflows.
    • Work experience with Automated Testing Implementation: Proven expertise in implementing and optimizing automated testing strategies within the release process, ensuring comprehensive test coverage and efficient identification of potential issues before software deployment.
    • Cloud Deployment Expertise: Nice to have experience includes a background in deploying software releases on cloud platforms, showcasing familiarity with cloud-native technologies and the ability to optimize release processes for scalability, resilience, and efficiency in cloud environments.

    SKILLS AND PERSONAL ATTRIBUTES.

    Skills:

    • Excellent communication skills.
    • Excellent interpersonal skills.
    • Leadership and Team Management.
    • Release Management and CI/CD Expertise.
    • Problem-solving and Decision-Making.

    Personal Attributes:

    • Develops and maintains positive working relationships with others - Shares ideas and information.
    • Assists colleagues unprompted.
    • Takes pride in achieving team objectives. Other elements may include, e.g.
    • Having credibility with peers and senior managers .
    • Being self-motivated – being driven to achieve results.
    • High customer service ethic – being passionate about meeting customer expectations and improving service levels.
    • Keeps pace with change – acquires knowledge/skills as the business develops.

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