Tech Lead - Messaging Experience Engineering

About the role

Watu, a fintech providing device financing across Africa and Latin America, is looking for a Tech Lead for its Messaging Experience Engineering squad. The role reports to the Head of Engineering, sits at the same level as the Product Owner, and covers a squad of 4-6 engineers. It is remote and open to Europe or Nairobi.

Key responsibilities

• Own the architecture, quality bar and escalation path for the squad, including the messaging dispatch layer (SMS, WhatsApp, FCM), the conversational orchestration engine and delivery reliability.
• Govern the Infobip integration: all flow logic, orchestration and business rules stay in-house, with partner code reviewed through PR access.
• Define the Definition of Done, approve all pull requests, own the release process and drive sprint planning with the Product Owner.
• Lead 3-5 direct reports (backend, frontend/mobile and QA engineers) on day-to-day unblocking, technical growth and honest feedback.
• Represent the squad to the Platform General Architecture and model AI-native engineering practices.

Required profile

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 2 years as the de facto technical authority for a product area or team.
• Strong backend fundamentals: distributed systems, event-driven architecture, API and database design, and testing strategy.
• Proven ability to review code across the full stack of the domain.
• Agile/Scrum or Kanban experience, with sprint ceremonies and backlog refinement alongside a Product Owner.
• Clear, direct communication with engineers, Product and the Head of Engineering.
• Preferred: fintech, payments or digital financial services experience in Africa, LATAM or APAC, and experience governing external engineering partners or SaaS vendors.

Required skills

• Hands-on backend experience with Java, Python or Node.js.
• Event-driven messaging at production scale (Kafka, RabbitMQ or equivalent).
• Conversational flows with WhatsApp Business API or similar, in a microservices architecture.
• SMS gateway integration, delivery optimization and multi-provider fallback.
• Engineering standards: GitHub, mandatory PR review, OpenAPI documentation, CI gates, secrets management.