Head of Engineering, Rewards

Job description

**Who we are** Moniepoint Inc. is Africa’s all-in-one financial platform, helping 20 million businesses and individuals access seamless payments, banking, credit, cross-border, and business management tools each month. As Nigeria’s largest merchant acquirer, we power most of the country’s point-of-sale (POS) transactions. Through our subsidiaries, Moniepoint Inc. processes over $250 billion in digital payment transaction value annually. **Why Kenya** Kenya is where our next chapter begins. Following our acquisition of Sumac Microfinance Bank, we're preparing to go live — which means the people we hire here help build a business from its first day, not inherit one. How we execute in Kenya will shape how we approach every market we enter after it, making this one of the most consequential engineering mandates in the business right now. This is the natural extension of our mission: to drive financial inclusion, and help millions of business owners and individuals across the African continent achieve financial happiness and success. So, now we are looking for our Head of Engineering, Rewards to join us in Kenya. **About The Role** Rewards is one of the most strategically important platforms at Moniepoint, and it is being built into a dedicated charter with its own engineering and product leadership. The platform sits at the centre of our retention strategy across a user base of approximately 23 million people. Today the platform does one thing: cashback. It works, but it has barely scratched the surface of what rewards can be, and the cashback product itself is not yet built to the depth it deserves. The ambition is to evolve it into a full rewards, retention, engagement and personalisation platform — and to do that across the full 360 degrees of our network. That means rewards for our business customers, rewards for our consumer customers, and rewards for the sales agents who drive our distribution. Very few companies get to design this from close to a blank page at this scale. The Head of Engineering owns that platform end to end. You will inherit a team of nine engineers, including an Engineering Manager, and build the organisation out from there — the current expectation is a minimum of three product units and upwards of 25 people, though the eventual shape is genuinely yours to define. Your first objective is to get the best possible performance out of the cashback product we already have. From there, you will work with Growth, Sales and Marketing to determine what we build for acquisition and retention, and roll it out across every customer we serve. This is a consumer-facing product engineering role, and that is the most important thing to understand about it. Rewards is won or lost on experimentation, personalisation, and the quality of the experience in a customer's hands. We are looking for a leader who has built and shipped direct-to-consumer products at scale, who is fluent in experimentation and A/B testing, and who has real depth in front-end and mobile engineering — not a purely backend platform leader. Moniepoint runs a Domain CTO model. We view our Heads of Engineering as the CTO of their domain: you own the technical roadmap, the architecture, the delivery, and the organisation beneath you. You will have full autonomy over engineering strategy, architecture, hiring, operating cadence and roadmap trade-offs. You will report functionally to our Group CTO, with a dual reporting line into the Product leader for Rewards. That second line is a delivery relationship rather than a seniority one — engineering and product are peers here, and you will build the team to full capacity together. Your responsibilities as Head of Engineering, Rewards includes: - Owning the technical strategy, architecture and roadmap for the Rewards Platform end to end. - Improving the performance, reliability and depth of the existing cashback product as an immediate first priority. - Evolving cashback into a broader rewards, retention, engagement and personalisation platform serving business customers, consumer customers and sales agents. - Building the engineering organisation from its current base - structuring product units, hiring engineers and Engineering Managers, and leading through those managers as the team scales. - Establishing a strong experimentation culture: A/B testing, cohort analysis, and measurement that lets the team learn quickly what actually changes customer behaviour. - Working closely with Growth, Sales and Marketing to translate acquisition and retention objectives into product and engineering initiatives. - Owning the customer-facing experience of rewards across mobile and web, including how quickly and reliably customers receive what they have earned. - Define architecture standards, engineering processes and quality metrics, and own the engineering health of the domain — incidents, production defects, deployment frequency, change failure rate, and developer experience. - Build the platform to serve customers across multiple geographies as Moniepoint expands. - Partner with Product to define the rewards-specific metrics and OKRs that do not yet exist, and hold the team to them. **Who You Are** - Direct-to-consumer product engineering at scale. You have built and shipped products used directly by large consumer audiences, and you understand what moves engagement and retention. This is the defining requirement of the role. - Genuine front-end and mobile depth. You have led or personally built consumer-facing mobile and web experiences. A backend-only background, however strong, is not what this role needs. - Experimentation and growth engineering. Hands-on experience running A/B tests, feature flagging, and measurement frameworks, and using the results to drive product decisions rather than to justify them. - At least 5 years of experience managing managers — leading an engineering organisation through other engineering leaders, not a single team. - Hands-on technical leadership. You are still close to the code. We expect a meaningful proportion of hands-on engineering time and technical credibility with the engineers you lead. - 10+ years of overall software engineering experience, with at least 5 years leading engineering teams through growth phases. - Comfort with our backend environment — Java and Spring Boot — and the ability to lead backend engineers credibly, even if it is not where your own depth sits. - Experience building and scaling an engineering organisation from a small base, including hiring and developing Engineering Managers. - Strong collaboration with commercial stakeholders — growth, marketing and sales — and the ability to translate business objectives into engineering work. - Rewards, loyalty, gamification, personalisation or growth platform experience is a strong advantage but is not required. - Fintech or payments experience is an advantage, not a requirement. **Cultural Alignment** As well, we assess every candidate across eight dimensions that define how great leaders operate at Moniepoint. We look for evidence of all eight throughout the process, not just in a single conversation. - Customer Obsession: Build deep empathy for users. Solve problems intuitively, and fix root causes, not just tickets. - Craft: Master the fundamentals. Reason from first principles, make trade-offs explicit, and raise the bar on quality. - Systemisation: Turn repeating decisions into scalable mechanisms. Reduce cognitive load and raise engineering quality. - Urgency: Move with disciplined speed. Act autonomously within scope, remove friction, and escalate risks early. - Ownership: Treat the platform as your own. Take initiative across boundaries and follow through without reminders. - No Ego: Put the mission first. Share credit, welcome debate, and never protect status over team outcomes. - Candour: Surface uncomfortable truths and risks early. Intelligent failure is welcome; concealment is not. - Integrity: Stay truthful and ethically consistent. Refuse toxic behavior. Performance without integrity is unacceptable. **What Success Looks Like In The Role** - The existing cashback product performing measurably better — faster, more reliable, and more compelling to customers. - A credible rewards platform roadmap defined with Product, and the first initiatives beyond cashback shipped. - A functioning experimentation practice, where the team ships, measures and learns on a short cycle. - An engineering organisation built out from its current base, with a strong bench of Engineering Managers and senior engineers. - Rewards established as a measurable contributor to retention and engagement across the customer base. - Clear architecture standards and engineering processes in place across the product units. **Why Join Us** - A rare blank page. The platform exists, but almost everything it could become is still ahead of it, and you will define what that is. - Direct influence on retention across a base of roughly 23 million users, at one of the largest and fastest-growing digital banks in Africa. - Full autonomy as the CTO of your domain, with the backing to build the organisation you think the problem needs. - Be part of a mission-driven company expanding access to financial services for millions of businesses and individuals. **What To Expect In The Hiring Process** - 60 minute High level System Design round with one of our Engineering Managers. - 60 minute Panel Interview with 2 of our Head of Engineering leaders. 30 minutes focused on a technical deep dive into your CV and into a project or system you built in the past. 30 minutes focused on testing for leadership attributes. - 60 minute Stakeholder Management Round with one of our Product Heads/VPs, focused on your stakeholder management and collaboration skills with product and business. - 60 minute Technical round and Culture fit interview with our Co-founder & Group CTO (the hiring manager). Moniepoint is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees and candidates. #LI-Remote