Head of Engineering
Stears
The Company
Stears is a Pan African data company. For global funds investing in Africa, Stears is the data and insights provider that enables quick, accurate decisions during the investment process. Stears users get access to industry, company, transaction, and macro data as well as constantly updated reports by researchers. Unlike other providers, Stears goes beyond just data to provide insights and context based on knowledge of local markets and delivers it all in an easy-to-use data platform. You can find more info about Stears here.
We are looking for a Senior Engineering Manager who can build a high performing team with a stellar culture of cultivating and supporting excellent engineers as well as holding them to high standards. We’ve seen first-hand the impact of diversity of background amongst engineers, gender diversity in particular. Hence we are strongly encouraging qualified women to apply for this role!
The Role
Why it’s important: Companies and Investors all over the world are seeking to understand the African landscape in relation to their world and investment opportunities – this is where Stears comes in. To meet our growth and expansion goals, we’ve built and deployed solutions at scale with multiple approaches across various tools and cloud providers. You take ownership of our team of talented engineers working across our full technology stack. You’ll ensure that we deliver high-quality products, maintain strong technical standards, and cultivate a vibrant engineering culture aligned with our mission. Reporting directly to the CTO, you will help shape our practices, mentor future leaders, and guide the team as we scale.
As a Senior Engineering Manager at Stears, your responsibilities are to:
- Build a world-class team
- Source best in class hires in record time.
- Mentor and train engineers and technical leads to improve their performance and overall leadership capacity.
- Intentionally specify and cultivate engineering culture aligned with business needs and local context.
- Lead on continuous training & skills within the engineering team.
- Structure the engineering focused teams to maximize product development quality and velocity.
- Choose product development practices and methods that match our needs.
- Drive engineering results
- Own end-to-end delivery process - agile frameworks, project management, familiarity with tools and techniques, good with documentation and meetings.
- Iterate on our processes and technology to eventually build scalable engineering practices that better serve the business every day - understands engineering best practices in collaboration, code writing, database management, monitoring, infrastructure provision, UX, etc.
- Collaborate with other teams to surface needs in business automation, partnerships and process improvement, and then to orchestrate our engineering team to resolve them with engineering best practices.
- Guide and help people to close the technical gaps after they have been identified.
- Set context so that engineers can be successful, connect the docs for them between their work and the company needs.
- Represent Stears Engineering Culture externally and internally
- Build Stears’ Engineering brand in relevant markets to increase the visibility of our work and to build a pipeline of potential future hires.
- Find opportunities for engineering to collaborate with other functions, to automate and optimize work processes.
- Make the work done by engineering visible and meaningful by showing it to other functions.
- Drive alignment on engineering tradeoffs with relevant stakeholders to help achieve the best outcome for the business.
- Represent engineering in management, in external partnerships, and in external events, etc.
We are looking for someone with:
Required skills & qualifications: These are the minimum requirements for the role
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- Experience communicating complex ideas clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Experience translating business needs into effective solution architectures.
- Experience leading and coaching software and data teams.
- Experience hiring and managing software engineers (junior, mid, senior, and technical leads)
- Experience working with agile teams using scrum, XP or other methodology.
- Experience working as a scrum master, product manager or delivery lead.
- Experience working with data teams, particularly data engineering.
- Interest or experience in AI/ML.
- At least 6 years of hands-on software development experience including:
- Full stack, data & devops engineering
- Automated testing, quality assurance, continuous integration and deployment
- Knowledge of modern cloud deployment targets and tools (AWS, GKE CloudSQL,, etc)
- Modern application programming frameworks & languages (e.g. React, NodeJS, Python)
- Git & Git-based deployment workflows
- Popular protocols & standards HTTP, REST, OIDC connect, OAuth2, JWT and modern authn/authz patterns
- Databases & schema design - SQL & NoSQL
- Knowledge of mobile developmentWe are looking for someone with:
Perks
Meaningful perks matter to us. They make employees better and contribute to making Stears a great place to work. If you join us, you can be assured that you’ll enjoy a wide range of generous perks, rewards and office benefits including:
- Flexible working we are currently hybrid (you chose what days you are in the office)
- Help lay the platform foundations of our African expansion. We are currently fleshing out our expansion strategy and would love you to be a part of this growth while doing impactful work
- Be part of our new product offerings
- Unlimited access to Stears Intelligence Solutions
- The Stears Experience - These are the top reasons economists report having the best experience of their careers at Stears:
- Deepen their analytical & critical thinking skills which apply beyond a specific domain
- Gain a high level of autonomy and responsibility by taking on a senior role in our high trust startup environment and relatively flat organizational hierarchy
- Do something meaningful by being part of a team making African data more widely available
- Access to an expert Intelligence & Analytics team - Stears Intelligence team includes some of the brightest knowledge experts in Nigeria covering a wide range of sectors, all with a passion for delivering the highest quality of intelligence and analytics on the African continent.
- Competitive salaries at junior, intermediate and senior levels
- Comprehensive Health Insurance coverage
- Paid time off - 25 days excluding public holidays and sick days (Prorated)
- Compassionate Leave
- Parental Leave
- Unlimited Sick Leave
- Special emphasis on learning and development
- Regular social activities, including annual off-site team bonding
- Stears branded merchandise and swag
Diversity
Stears is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and will consider all qualified applicants regardless of color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital or family status, disability, gender identity or expression, veteran status, actual or presumed belonging to an ethnic group, or any other legally protected status. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.