Principle Engineer at Prodigy Finance

Why this is an amazing opportunity

This role is perfect for an experienced Principal Engineer who wants to supercharge their career by experiencing first-hand what it is like to be part of an energetic, extremely fast-growing company.

The sense of impact and reward will be huge. You will help to build a product which makes a very real difference in the world. Be a part of delivering socially responsible financial services to the masses; make it possible for students from more than 150 countries to obtain the finance to fulfil their dream of studying at the world’s top universities and schools.

We are a non-hierarchical team; this means that you are going to get exposure to all aspects of our business immediately. You’ll gain as much accountability as you can handle and have a huge influence on scaling the company.

Our team is very international and very sociable; you will interact with the broader business on a regular basis. The position will be based in Cape Town.

One of our goals is to build one of the top FinTech teams and cultures anywhere in the world. This means putting a lot of time into ensuring we only hire people with exceptional potential and creating the best working environment possible. If you want to work somewhere where you're learning from some of the best brains in FinTech, this would be a good fit.

Why join Prodigy Finance

• Be a part of a pioneering global growth company
• Experience the excitement and learn from being part of an incredibly fast-growing young company. No kidding – exponential growth. Happening right now
• Be pivotal in continuing to scale the business by identifying smart solutions and partners with tech at the heart of it
• Enjoy the agility and flexibility offered by our culture. We’re still a start-up at heart, so you can expect a sociable, relaxed and friendly work environment (with a serious coffee culture where you can wear shorts to work)
• We will help you make your mark. Make a real impact on the business and experience a steep learning curve with huge opportunities to grow and develop
• Gain an inside perspective on the functioning of a venture-backed FinTech company with successful start-up roots, backed by top VCs, learn day-to-day management and build functional expertise
• Build a platform that helps to make a very real difference in the world

What you will do in the role

As a Principal Engineer, you will be driving change in how we build software as an Agile engineering team. You will share your expertise with all of our software engineering teams through teaching, engaging in active debates and actively showing how things could be done. You will engage across teams as well as occasionally joining a team when it makes sense. You will be a self-driven and self-directed acceleration agent helping our teams to upskill, to deliver software well and to adopt new ideas and techniques that will support us in being the most capable software engineering team possible.

The Prodigy Finance Technology Team is made up of multiple autonomous, self-organising teams delivering software in an agile way. We are using cross-team mechanisms such as guilds and working groups to drive change and make decisions. This brings different challenges to the role of Principal Engineer and you will need to bring your experience and deep understanding in order to help influence and effect change across our teams.

Specific responsibilities are to:

• Lead in the improvement of the way we deliver software, learn and work, by driving change within the Technology Team to solve cross-company challenges
• Look for opportunities to be better including improving our software systems and architecture; our designs in code; our understanding of our domains and how they can be effectively broken up; different ways of thinking about software development, tools, etc.
• Help formulate and drive the overall architecture of our systems. Help ensure that the overall high-level domain architecture remains coherent as requirements evolve and change
• Champion our architectural choices and software engineering practices and help teams to progress towards the overall technology strategy
• Guide complex architectural changes that touch multiple systems owned by more than one team
• Lead, accelerate, educate and coach software engineers and the wider Technology team in your area(s) of expertise
• Proactively identify areas where you can add the most value and motivate for focusing on them
• Join a team or work across multiple teams - whatever works to achieve the company and technology goals

What you will be measured on

• Your ability to lead and influence impactful, long-lasting improvements to our architecture and the way we work as a Technology team
• A proactive approach to suggesting solutions that take into account the longer-term strategy vs time-sensitive business needs
• Your ability to establish a rapport with teams and engineers to understand their context and problems and come up with impactful experiments or well-established solutions to influence change
• Your positive impact on your colleagues and the Technology team as a whole
• Your effective delivery of software continuously
• Your ability to interact with stakeholders and understand their needs
• Fostering a culture of continuous engineering improvement through mentoring, feedback, and metrics

What you need to be great at

• Able to influence and command respect for your opinion from technical and non-technical people alike
• Always searching for the underlying principles and values for any given practice, decision or way of working to really understand what factors are at play
• Able to easily embed in any team without breaking the dynamic of the team and positively add value quickly to help accelerate the team towards shared goals
• Able to communicate ideas with teams effectively and guide and coach them towards better ways of doing things
• Able to manage cross-team and Technology team to business relationships. Ability to work across multiple teams with ease helping them coordinate and deliver software
• Able to empathise with each team in their context. Fully understand the problems that they face and suggest improvements that work for everyone
• Great at researching ways to educate the engineering team in new methods and techniques
• You value skills development. You’re a great mentor and teacher that exhibits patience and thoughtfulness in understanding the needs of others and helping them to achieve their goals
• Empathising with your users and stakeholders by viewing the problem from their point of view

Who we are looking for; track record must-haves

• A track record providing technical leadership to teams
• Strong interpersonal skills with the ability to mentor and coach fellow team members
• 15+ years of software development with deep expertise in the principles, patterns, practice and pitfalls of one or more of: agile software development; distributed systems and microservices; data warehousing and data solutions for distributed systems; infrastructure and DevOps
• Desire and willingness to work in an agile, collaborative, innovative, flexible and team-oriented environment
• Experience working within an agile environment with a good understanding of how to test and build testable software.
• A strong foundation on modern DevOps culture and experience with Continuous Delivery practises.
• Experience working with relational databases
• Extensive development experience with one or more dynamically typed languages
• Experience with building and operating scalable services and platforms

Experience that would be nice to have (but we’ll trade off if everything else fits)

• Microservice application development experience
• Extensive experience with agile software development practices
• Extensive experience with one or more of Ruby, Rails, Python, SQL
• Solid DevOps skills including monitoring, testing, automation and integration
• Experience in orchestration tools (Chef, Docker, Terraform, Jenkins)
• Experience with distributed systems and services architectures and associated paradigms and technology stacks including message brokers such as RabbitMQ
• Full-stack infrastructure knowledge from front-end to back-end
• Professional fluency in open source tools, including git, Jenkins, and others
• Experience with Cloud platforms such as AWS
• Startup experience. Sometimes the earth moves beneath your feet at Prodigy Finance so you have to be comfortable with ambiguity, able to wear lots of hats and adapt easily as we continue to grow

Do you want to be our next Principal Engineer? Here’s what to do now:

If this sounds exciting and you'd like to have an informal chat, get in touch below and tell us why you want to work at Prodigy Finance.