Senior Software Engineering Manager

About the role

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. Main Objectives & Responsibilities: Team Leadership & People Management: Lead, mentor, and develop a high-performing team of software engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence, accountability, and continuous improvement. Technical Strategy & Architectural Oversight: Define and drive the technical roadmap for the backend platform, ensuring architectural decisions promote scalability, security, and maintainability across all event-driven services built with Java, Spring Boot, and Clojure. Engineering Excellence & Delivery: Champion the adoption and rigorous application of engineering best practices, including Test-Driven Development (TDD), secure software development practices, clean code principles, and efficient CI/CD processes, to ensure predictable and high-quality feature delivery. Cross-Functional Collaboration: Collaborate strategically with product managers, QA and platform engineers, and other business functions to translate complex product and technology vision into clear technical execution approaches and successfully delivered features. Contribution & Impact: This role is critical for scaling the engineering organization and our core platform. Your leadership will directly result in a more productive and skilled engineering team, a resilient and high-performing core infrastructure, and a significantly improved velocity for delivering new, market-driving business capabilities to our customers. Sustained stability in the core Java and Clojure platform and the strategic adoption of new technologies and approaches such as AI, will be key measures of success.

Responsibilities

• Team Leadership and Mentorship
• Help your team deeply understand business, customer, and partner needs, translating them into thoughtful technical and product decisions.
• Promote a culture of ownership, accountability, and high standards, enabling your team to move quickly and deliver meaningful results.
• Support engineers in their growth and development by conducting regular one-on-ones, performance reviews, and career development discussions.
• Drive hiring, onboarding, and training of new engineering talent.
• Technical Strategy & Architectural Roadmapping
• Partner with senior engineers, solution architects and principal engineers to shape and execute on the technical strategy for your area.
• Guide the architectural evolution of services, event-driven systems (Kafka/RabbitMQ), and data pipelines at scale.
• Define technology standards, development methodologies, and security best practices for the team.
• Engineering Excellence and Quality Assurance
• Contribute to Ezra's engineering culture, helping shape how we build great software and work together effectively.
• Instill Test-Driven Development (TDD), ensuring all features are accompanied by comprehensive unit, integration, and end-to-end tests.
• Oversee software design, development, and code review processes and set a high bar for code quality, maintainability, and security.
• Implement and foster secure software design and development approaches that minimize the attack surface and associated risk.
• Delivery Management and Performance Optimization
• Manage the execution of the engineering roadmap, working with product managers to prioritise and scope features.
• Monitor system performance and stability, providing guidance to the team on profiling, load testing, and implementing effective caching/performance tuning strategies.
• Collaborate with platform engineering to streamline CI/CD pipelines, optimize deployment strategies, and ensure operational excellence.
• Hands-on Software Development
• Contribute directly to production code, staying close to the work and building knowledge & context through first-hand experience.
• Utilise AI-enabled software development practices, acting as a role model for software engineers and demonstrating the state of the possible.
• 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 c

Benefits

Additional Information

Job Title: Senior Software Engineering Manager Location: Nairobi, Kenya Reports to: Chief Technology Officer

Your Match

How well this role fits your profile.

Company Intel

What employees say

Worked at Ezra? Share your experience