Tech Lead - Onboarding Engineering

About the role

Watu is a fintech operating across Africa and Latin America, providing device financing and financial services to customers excluded from the formal financial system. As Tech Lead of the Onboarding Engineering squad, you are the technical authority for your team of 4-6 engineers, reporting to the Head of Engineering and sitting as a peer of the Product Owner. The role is flexible, based in Europe or Nairobi.

Key responsibilities

• Own the architecture of vehicle and phone onboarding flows, from customer entry to KYC resolution and loan disbursement, including back-office flows
• Govern the partner: review all code changes, own architecture decisions and hold final sign-off on releases
• Own the KYC and anti-fraud engine, the B2B Licensing Portal and APIs, and the technical readiness for new market launches
• Enforce engineering standards: GitHub, mandatory PR review, coverage gates, OpenAPI documentation, runbooks and secrets management
• Approve pull requests, define the Definition of Done, own the release process and drive sprint planning with the Product Owner
• Manage 3-5 direct reports (backend, frontend/mobile and QA engineers): unblock them, give timely feedback and support their growth
• Model AI-native engineering, with every engineer using AI/LLM tools actively

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, testing strategy
• Proven ability to review code across the full stack of your domain
• Agile/Scrum or Kanban experience, driving sprint ceremonies and backlog refinement with a Product Owner
• Clear, direct communicator with engineers, Product and the Head of Engineering
• Preferred: fintech, payments or digital financial services experience in Africa or LATAM, and experience governing external engineering partners or SaaS vendors

Required skills

• Java backend development (preferred)
• Angular or React.js frontend
• Event-driven architecture, Kafka or equivalent message brokers (preferred)
• B2B API design patterns and partner integration governance
• OpenAPI/Swagger documentation and OpenAPI governance