Senior DevOps Engineer at KOKO Networks in Nairobi

About KOKO Networks
KOKO Networks is a venture-backed climate-tech company with 1,200+ employees across East Africa & India. Our mission is to imagine and deliver technology that improves life in the world’s fastest growing cities. We offer a fast-paced and highly collaborative work environment with significant opportunities for professional growth. Our core lines of business currently include: (1) KOKO Fuel, an ultra-clean liquid bioethanol cooking fuel solution delivered via a network of smart fuel ATMs and leveraging existing downstream liquid fuels infrastructure; (2) KOKO Climate, which retails the emissions reductions that occur from switching households from deforestation-based charcoal to KOKO Fuel; and (3) KOKO Club, a tech-enabled, direct-to-consumer, instant fulfillment retail platform operated in partnership with neighborhood retailers. In 2021, KOKO was selected as the world’s leading emerging markets climate technology solution by FT/IFC.

Your Role

As KOKO grows within and outside Kenya, our team is looking for experienced DevOps engineers to join the Site Reliability Engineering Team, whose mission is to ensure KOKO delivers a highly reliable, scalable, secure, and cost-effective cloud platform to its users.

Your role will require you to lead on operations activities relating to these areas and be responsible for their successful ongoing execution. You will keep a watchful eye on our systems’ capacity and performance, eliminate operational work through automation and build infrastructure monitoring and management tools. KOKO’s suite of products spans multiple technical domains and disciplines in software and hardware, and so experience in end-to-end systems thinking across distributed components is key to enabling KOKO’s expansion within and outside of Kenya.

What you will do

• Lead small teams and projects to build tools and software to manage cloud infrastructure and applications.
• Own production environments and develop a holistic view of system health for the benefit of your own and other teams, troubleshooting any part of supported services when needed.
• Collaborate with other engineering teams to manage deployment and monitoring of all KOKO’s distributed software applications, ensuring systems are available at all times.
• Measure and optimise system performance, to staying ahead of customer needs
• Design and apply best practices in the areas of secure cloud design patterns, automated security, CI/CD across KOKO’s teams and projects, helping others to deliver their solutions more effectively.
• Collect and analyse metrics to make recommendations for performance improvements and fault findings.
• Participate in system design reviews, infrastructure management and capacity planning.
• Establish and implement administrative and operational best practices for engineering teams
• Detect abnormalities in performance and proactively address issues before they impact our customers
• Be on-call to manage high priority issues when needed, in collaboration with other engineering team members via our incident response processes.
• Participate in building the engineering culture at KOKO.

KOKO’s current technology stack includes (but is not limited to): AWS, Docker, Terraform, Jenkins, CircleCI, Ansible, Python, Flask, Vue.js, Postgres, Kotlin, Java, Firebase, C++, Celery, Message Queues, Odoo ERP, Git

What You Will Bring to KOKO

• Five or more years of experience working with SRE and/or DevOps and/or cloud teams.
• Python and shell scripting experience.
• Strong track record designing and delivering automated toolchains and secure cloud patterns.
• Experience with Infrastructure as code and APM tools.
• Experience in the following areas: enterprise application and service based architectures, software design methods, CI/CD, cyber security, process automation, QA and test automation, and highly scalable data architectures.
• Understanding of Linux operating system, networking, and databases
• Strong understanding of principles and practices to be applied to excel at this role.
• Well developed skills in designing and building for performance, reliability, security and maintainability.
• Strong communicator, both written and verbal, who is calm and decisive under pressure.
• Empathy for your colleagues, encouraging team members to think creatively while knowing where to intervene to tackle tough problems and navigate conflicts.
• We use AWS extensively and so, certifications with cloud technologies is a bonus.

What We Offer

• Competitive salary plus a quarterly cash bonus
• Annual compensation reviews - we reward great work
• 21 days of annual leave plus public holidays plus examination leave
• Hybrid working model - allowing you to split your time between in-person collaboration at one of our offices and working remotely
• Ongoing investment in you and your skills, incl. full access to over 5,000 online courses
• The right equipment for the job - a choice of MacBook, Windows, or Linux laptop
• Health insurance

We believe that our people are critical for our ambitious growth plans in Kenya and beyond. We want to build an organisation where people thrive, feel included, grow professionally, and enjoy having high impact through their work.

If you share our passion for technology and our vision for global impact, we strongly encourage you to apply!

KOKO is committed to gender and racial diversity in the workplace. We encourage candidates of all backgrounds to apply!