Java Backend Engineering Team Lead

As an engineer at Imara, you won’t just be building features; you will be engineering the "trust infrastructure" that ensures every dollar reaches the front lines, empowering community-led organizations to deliver hyper-proximate interventions for the women and girls who need them most.

Key Engineering Pillars

• Financial Infrastructure for Outcomes: Developing a "single-contract" FinTech solution that aligns with government procurement needs while allowing for flexible reallocation of capital across geographies.
• AI-Driven Verification & Fraud Prevention: Utilizing AI and the proven Tiko platform to automate data collection and verify real-world impact, replacing manual, high-cost auditing with real-time, high-integrity data.
• Ecosystem-Scale Architecture: Building a platform designed to serve the entire sector, going beyond Tiko to support a wide range of organizations and funders in a unified, transparent ecosystem.
• Data Integrity for Social Good: Managing sensitive health and educational data with the highest security standards, ensuring that "paying for what works" becomes the global standard for philanthropy.

For this position, we are happily looking for candidates currently based in South Africa, and Kenya

The Job

Our Java Engineering Team Lead is responsible for leading and developing a team of software engineers and creating and maintaining the Imara Impact software. Other responsibilities include:

• Lead and develop the individuals in your team.
• Design, develop, and maintenance of new features on the Imara Impact software.
• Our team works in an agile way, and you will be part of the rituals and practices.
• Coordination of the work that the software engineering team need to do.
• Applying software engineering principles to the design, development, maintenance, testing, and evaluation of our software.
• Ensuring that the software you develop is secure and safe when it comes to data protection.
• You document your work and make sure that your documentation is clear and understandable for future use by others.

About You

• You have in-depth development experience using Java and building software from the ground up. You’re a logical thinker and a natural problem solver who wants to use your technical skillset to make an impact.

Requirements:  

• 8+ years of backend engineering experience focused on JVM languages
• 3+ years of formal leadership experience managing a team of Java backend engineers, including responsibility for conducting team performance reviews
• Experience within Microservices and AWS  
• You have extensive experience working with the Spring framework, as well as various other Java backend tools and frameworks
• Experience or knowledge of Salesforce CRM would be a plus
• You don’t want to just write code, you want to build scalable systems with quality
• You are based in Kenya or South Africa
• You have excellent English skills