Head of Engineering - Digital Experience
Hybrid · Nairobi, Nairobi County, Kenya
Job Summary
Head of Engineering, Digital Experience at Watu. You will lead four squads (Payments Engineering, Messaging Experience Engineering, Android Experience Engineering, Growth & Loyalty Engineering) and a QA chapter, own engineering standards, architecture, and release management for the customer-facing CX layer, and hire and develop Tech Leads and engineers. This is a hands-on senior leadership role reporting to the CTO, with responsibility for building the CX engineering function, partnering with Product leads, and shaping how we deliver payments, messaging, mobile experiences, and growth features for customers in an emerging-market fintech context.
Required Qualifications
- 7+ years of software engineering experience
- At least 3 years leading engineering teams of 15+ people across multiple squads or product areas
- Track record of shipping customer-facing products at scale (payments, mobile apps, messaging, or growth engineering) in fintech/e-commerce
- Strong technical depth in backend (APIs, event-driven architecture, distributed systems) and mobile/frontend fluency for Android squads
- Experience with partner or vendor governance and external teams delivering work
- Proven ability to build and develop engineering managers and Tech Leads into technical authorities
- Comfortable operating in markets with limited infrastructure, mobile-first, low-bandwidth contexts
- Fluent in modern engineering practices: trunk-based development, CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, security-first API design, test automation
- Hands-on leadership in an engineering culture focused on AI-native workflows
- Experience with API design, release management, QA integration across squads
- Experience operating in a squad-based model (Spotify-like)
- Nairobi-based or willingness to relocate to Nairobi
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