Head of Engineering, Sales Management Tools

Who we are

[Employer] 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, [Employer] Inc. processes over $250 billion in digital payment transaction value annually.

Why South Africa  

South Africa has one of the strongest engineering communities anywhere in the world, and we are deliberately growing our technology organisation in the country. We already have several team members based here. The work is fully remote, and the mission we are working on is a good deal closer to home than it is for our teams elsewhere.

So, now we are looking for our Head of Engineering, Sales Management Tools, to join us in South Africa.

About The Role

Sales Management Tools owns MonieCRM, the operating system for [Employer]'s 50,000-strong sales network. This is not a CRM we bought — it is a workforce operations platform built entirely in-house for a multi-level field sales hierarchy, and it is how those teams run their day to day: the portfolio of businesses they manage, their own teams, their goals and performance, the physical and digital resources they need in the field, and an emerging AI-assisted support layer. Sixteen capabilities span onboarding and network management, pipeline and portfolio, performance and goals, compensation, and sales experience and support.

A significant part of the domain moves money. The platform owns wallets, commission calculation and attribution, cashout and welfare funds for a network that drives the overwhelming majority of company revenue — which makes financial correctness, not just availability, a core engineering requirement of the role.

Alongside that, the domain covers partner management, a rewards and retention platform serving tens of millions of users, and our marketing technology stack, including the engineering and customisation of Braze, the platform we use for customer engagement. The mandate is modernisation and reliability: re-architecting systems that have grown very quickly and making them dependable at a scale of more than 20 million users. This is a platform engineering and legacy modernisation challenge first and foremost, and prior CRM or SalesTech experience is genuinely not required.

Who You Are 

• You have 10–15 years of overall software engineering experience, with at least 5 years leading engineering teams through growth phases.
• 5+ years of hands-on, production-level experience writing and shipping Java code as a practising engineer. This means years spent writing Java yourself, not years spent overseeing teams who write it.
• At least 5 years of experience managing managers — leading an engineering organisation through other engineering leaders, rather than running a single team.
• You have proven platform engineering experience at scale — building and running complex distributed systems, not feature delivery alone.
• You have navigated legacy migrations and re-architecture projects at 20M+ user scale.
• You have strong backend engineering skills in high-throughput, data-intensive distributed systems, and are proficient in Java and Spring Boot.
• You have managed and developed large engineering teams of 20 or more members.
• Experience building systems where financial correctness matters — commissions, payouts, wallets, ledgers or equivalent — is a strong advantage.
• A fintech or payments background is strongly preferred. CRM or SalesTech domain experience is nice to have and explicitly not required.
• Exposure to customer engagement or marketing automation platforms such as Braze is a plus, but not a requirement.

Cultural Alignment

As well, we assess every candidate across eight dimensions that define how great leaders operate at [Employer]. 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

• Legacy systems modernised and re-architected, with measurable improvement in reliability and performance.
• Commissions and earnings calculated, attributed and paid accurately and on time, at network scale.
• A sales and marketing platform that scales with a rapidly growing agent network across multiple markets.
• Commercial teams able to move faster because the tooling beneath them is dependable.
• A high-performing engineering team with a strong bench of managers and senior engineers.

Why Join Us

• Own the platform behind the commercial engine of one of Africa's largest digital banks — the system 50,000 people rely on to do their jobs and to get paid.
• A genuine platform modernisation mandate with the autonomy and backing to see it through.
• Be part of a mission-driven company impacting millions of businesses and individuals across Africa and beyond.

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).

[Employer] is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees and candidates.

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