Software Engineer L3 (Rails) job at ENGIE Energy Access

About the Organization

ENGIE Energy Access is the leading Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGo) and mini-grids solutions provider in Africa. The company develops innovative, off-grid solar solutions for homes, public services and businesses, enabling customers and distribution partners access to clean, affordable energy. The PAYGO solar home systems are financed through affordable instalments from $0.19 per day and the mini-grids foster economic development by enabling electrical productive use and triggering business opportunities for entrepreneurs in rural communities. With over 1,800 employees, operations in nine countries across Africa (Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia), over 1.8 million customers and more than 9 million lives impacted so far, ENGIE Energy Access aims to impact 20 million lives across Africa by 2025.

Job Description

ENGIE Energy Access is the leading Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGo) and mini-grids solutions provider in Africa. The company develops innovative, off-grid solar solutions for homes, public services and businesses, enabling customers and distribution partners access to clean, affordable energy. The PAYGO solar home systems are financed through affordable instalments from $0.19 per day and the mini-grids foster economic development by enabling electrical productive use and triggering business opportunities for entrepreneurs in rural communities. With over 1,800 employees, operations in nine countries across Africa (Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia), over 1.9 million customers and more than 9 million lives impacted so far, ENGIE Energy Access aims to impact 20 million lives across Africa by 2025.

Job Purpose/Mission 
We are looking for a full-stack software engineer to join our digital team and help us to deliver affordable solar power to emerging markets. If you are confident in the Rails world and if you want to create real, positive impact with your work, please reach out to us.
This position offers a great opportunity to directly contribute to the success of a mission driven company with social and environmental impact. You will work closely with our stakeholders and users in Africa and beyond.
Our small, self-organized, distributed team (Kampala / Berlin / Nairobi) develops the backbone of our operations, which we also provide to other businesses in the PAYGo sector as Software as a Service – see https://paygee.com.
Our Stack
• Rails 5, Sidekiq, ActiveAdmin, Grape, Devise, RSpec, Thinking Sphinx
• JavaScript VueJS, Angular
• Databases MySQL, Mongo, Cassandra, Redis
• Gitlab selfhosted for git and CI/CD
• Deployment: Capistrano
• Fresh Ideas Always welcome!

Duties and Responsibilities

Participate in the software planning sessions, together with product managers and engineers to discuss delivery time estimates, risks and key practical considerations such as technical debt, feasibility at scale etc.
Own initiative and complete it from start to finish, provide guidance to other engineers and deliver a complete solution subject to all engineering best practices, timeline considerations and potential dependencies in the software with no supervision.
Represent technical team in business conversations and work closely with stakeholders to deliver solutions which fit the needs of the business and provide fairly accurate effort estimates and risk assessment
Participate in Peer-Review, ensuring high quality software solutions with a minimum of bugs and unforeseen side-effects

Participate and strongly contribute to architectural discussion on important areas of software that impact performance and reliability of our software. Identify and communicate risk in approaches or implementation details, technical debt, assumptions, etc.
Contribute to change of processes, adoption of best industry practices and mentor junior engineers and provide technical guidance
Provide support where engineering intervention is required (e.g. due to bugs or performance problems)

Qualification, Experiences and Competencies

Bachelors or Masters in a relevant engineering discipline (Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, Computer Science are preferred)
4+ years of practical experience in software engineering
Programming language proficiency in Ruby and Rails and front-end/JavaScript frameworks (React, Agular, Vue)
HTML4/5, CSS3, AJAX along with strong knowledge of DOM TDD in Ruby/Rails
Experience creating and maintaining scalable web applications: Background Jobs, Event Queues, Containerization, Linux
Experience on high availability, observability and structured logging
API design to scale in Ruby (REST, GraphQL, etc.)
Good knowledge of Databases (MySQL) and object relational mappers (ActiveRecord) and their implementation design patterns
Appreciation for detailed source code documentation and organized code structuring
Software deployment pipelines and best practice (CI/CD)

Excellent knowledge of computer algorithms and solid computer science fundamentals
Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English

Desired Skills & Experience

5 years of experience in developing large production grade web applications with Ruby on Rails
Forward thinking with ability to recognize the impact of technology in business
Strong software engineering and architectural patterns background (MVC, MVP, CQRS, DDD, SOLID, hexagonal, Microservices)
Knowledge of container orchestration using Kubernetes (and associated tools such as Kops, Ksync, Telepresence, Terraform...), is a strong advantage
Server backend management experience (Linux, MySQL, Systemd, Apache, Nginx, etc.)
Good knowledge of web application security
Knowledge of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its services, such as, but not limited to, EC2, RDS, EBS, S3, Lambda functions