Tech Lead - Aftersales Engineering

About the role

Watu, a fintech providing device financing across Africa and Latin America, is looking for a Tech Lead for its Aftersales Engineering squad. The role reports to the Head of Engineering, sits at the heart of the engineering organisation and is a peer of the Product Owner. It combines light people management with deep technical ownership of the aftersales domain.

The squad has 4-6 engineers, including the Tech Lead, and works on post-sale workflows such as device swaps, repairs, insurance claims and returns. The location is flexible, either Europe or Nairobi.

Key responsibilities

• Own the technical architecture, API contracts, data models and integration patterns, and the architectural decision records.
• Enforce engineering standards: GitHub for all code, mandatory PR review, coverage gates, OpenAPI documentation, runbooks and secrets management.
• Represent the squad to the Platform General Architecture and escalate cross-squad concerns.
• Review and approve all pull requests, define the Definition of Done, and own the release process.
• Drive sprint planning with the Product Owner and turn user stories into technical tasks.
• Govern external partners where applicable: review partner code via PR access and control architecture, quality and release timing.
• Manage 4-6 direct reports (backend, frontend/mobile and QA engineers), unblock them, give timely feedback and help them adopt AI/LLM tools.

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

Required skills

• Backend fundamentals: distributed systems, event-driven architecture, API design, database design and testing strategy.
• Hands-on Java backend development (preferred).
• Preferred: event-driven architecture, Kafka or equivalent message brokers.