Tech Lead - Android Experience Engineering

About the role

Watu, a fintech company operating across Africa and Latin America, provides device financing and financial services to customers excluded from the formal financial system. Its Tech Lead for the Android Experience Engineering squad in Nairobi reports to the Head of Engineering and sits at peer level with the Product Owner. The squad has 4-6 engineers including the Tech Lead, and the Tech Lead has 3-5 direct reports (Backend, Frontend/Mobile and QA engineers).

Key responsibilities

• Own the technical architecture, API contracts, data models, integration patterns and 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 and QA strategy (release cadence, feature flags, staged rollouts, rollback procedures).
• Drive sprint planning with the Product Owner, translating user stories into technical tasks and surfacing risks early.
• Govern external partners: partner code is reviewed via PR access and nothing enters production without the Tech Lead's review.
• Manage 4-6 direct reports, unblock them, give timely feedback and feed performance reviews and hiring decisions to the Head of Engineering.
• Model AI-native engineering, expecting every engineer to use 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.
• Proven ability to review and reason about 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, LATAM or APAC; experience governing external engineering partners or SaaS vendors; hands-on Java backend development; event-driven architecture, Kafka or equivalent.

Required skills

• Strong Android development background (Java or Kotlin)
• Android app release management: Play Store submission, staged rollouts, feature flags, crash monitoring
• Mobile API design (REST, offline support, low-bandwidth environments)
• Distributed systems, event-driven architecture, API and database design, testing strategy