About Us:

Wasoko (“people of the market” in Swahili) is transforming communities across Africa by revolutionizing access to essential goods and services. We are East Africa’s biggest digitized retail distribution platform powered by our own in-house logistics network. Tens of thousands of informal retailers across seven countries (Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Zambia) use Wasoko to order everyday essential goods and receive working capital financing.

The informal retailers of Africa today are the primary if not the only channel used by consumers to purchase essential goods worth over $600 billion per year. The fragmented infrastructure across large land mass, distributed but diverse population and rather a smaller basket size spend does not yet lend themselves to big basket retail or mass consumer eCommerce. Instead, the informal retail ecosystem is THE channel for building the plumbing for digital and consumer
commerce across Africa.

This is Wasoko’s opportunity. Wasoko with its brand, scale and logistics network is best positioned to build the technology-leveraged rails to serve the 1+ billion African consumers through informal retailers. We are building a digital-first operating system for informal retailers, initially focusing on B2B distribution but quickly incorporating other tools and services to help communities across Africa get more for less.

Principal Site Reliability Engineer

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) combines software and systems engineering to build and run large-scale, distributed, fault-tolerant systems. SRE ensures that Wasoko’s services—both our internally critical and our externally-visible systems— are reliable, available (uptime) and secure. Additionally, SREs will keep an ever-watchful eye on our system's capacity and performance. They set up standards for monitoring and alerting that is followed by service owners across the company. They focus on tooling and automation to make it easy for service owners to adopt SRE best practices.

You are an early engineer in our new platform team - a high-impact opportunity. You have the opportunity to set standards, establish best practices, and mentor service engineers. You will also have the opportunity to grow and present Wasoko and its engineering excellence as one of the first movers in Africa. You will get to work with some of the strongest talents across the globe with a wealth of experience and talent.

What you will do:

• Architect and build infrastructure to support the platform using a variety of GCP tools and technologies
• Be responsible for network, security and systems monitoring, alert standards and drive adoption across engineering and data teams
• Set up a 24x7 tier-1 support process to respond quickly to issue
• Develop tooling for the entire engineering team to improve productivity
• Build, interact, coordinate, and negotiate with our tool's vendors

What you need to excel in this role:

Data-driven approach and ability to quickly and effectively resolve problems

• Fluent coding ability with application programming as well as scripting languages (any of ruby, python, json, yaml, rest, node js, java, goland, psql)
• Strong and hands-on knowledge of GCP services, tools and best practices
• Understanding of web application architecture and security best practices (e.g. OWASP Top 10)
• Experience with server provisioning/configuration management tools, CI/CD experience, and managing the deployment flow from code commit to production release
• Excellent attention to detail, ability to organize and give honest feedback
• Team players and potential leaders collaborate to drive efficient engagement with our external partners