Head of Engineering, Rewards

About This Opportunity

We are representing a confidential fintech organization that is expanding across Africa and building critical retention infrastructure for a user base in the tens of millions. They are hiring a Head of Engineering, Rewards to lead the evolution of their rewards platform from a single cashback product into a comprehensive retention, engagement, and personalization engine serving business customers, consumers, and distribution agents.

This is a consumer-facing product engineering role. You will own the technical roadmap, architecture, and organization for a platform that sits at the center of retention strategy across approximately 23 million users. You will inherit a team of nine engineers and scale it to multiple product units with upwards of 25 people. The immediate priority is optimizing the existing cashback product; from there, you will define and ship what comes next.

Our client operates a Domain CTO model. As Head of Engineering for Rewards, you are the CTO of your domain—full autonomy over technical strategy, architecture, hiring, and roadmap trade-offs. You will report functionally to the Group CTO with a dual reporting line into Product leadership (a delivery relationship, not a hierarchy—engineering and product are peers).

This role is based in Kenya, where the organization is building a new market from the ground up following a strategic acquisition.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical strategy, architecture, and roadmap for the rewards platform end to end
• Improve performance, reliability, and depth of the existing cashback product as an immediate first priority
• Evolve cashback into a broader rewards, retention, engagement, and personalization platform serving multiple customer segments
• Build the engineering organization from its current base—structure product units, hire engineers and Engineering Managers, lead through managers as the team scales
• Establish a strong experimentation culture: A/B testing, cohort analysis, and measurement frameworks that inform what actually changes customer behavior
• Work closely with Growth, Sales, and Marketing to translate acquisition and retention objectives into product and engineering initiatives
• Own the customer-facing experience of rewards across mobile and web, including delivery speed and reliability
• Define architecture standards, engineering processes, and quality metrics; own engineering health—incidents, production defects, deployment frequency, change failure rate, developer experience
• Build the platform to serve customers across multiple geographies as the organization expands
• Partner with Product to define rewards-specific metrics and OKRs and hold the team accountable to them

What We're Looking For

Direct-to-consumer product engineering at scale is the defining requirement. You have built and shipped products used directly by large consumer audiences and understand what drives engagement and retention.

• Genuine front-end and mobile depth: You have led or personally built consumer-facing mobile and web experiences. Backend-only experience, however strong, is not sufficient for this role
• Experimentation and growth engineering: Hands-on experience running A/B tests, feature flagging, and measurement frameworks, using results to drive product decisions
• At least 5 years managing managers—leading an engineering organization through other engineering leaders, not a single team
• Hands-on technical leadership: Still close to the code, with technical credibility among the engineers you lead
• 10+ years of overall software engineering experience, with at least 5 years leading engineering teams through growth phases
• Comfort with the backend environment (Java and Spring Boot) and ability to lead backend engineers credibly, even if it is not your primary depth
• Experience building and scaling an engineering organization from a small base, including hiring and developing Engineering Managers
• Strong collaboration with commercial stakeholders—growth, marketing, sales—and ability to translate business objectives into engineering work
• Rewards, loyalty, gamification, personalization, or growth platform experience is a strong advantage but not required
• Fintech or payments experience is an advantage, not a requirement

Cultural Alignment: Our client assesses candidates across eight leadership dimensions—Customer Obsession, Craft, Systemization, Urgency, Ownership, No Ego, Candor, and Integrity. These define how great leaders operate in this environment.

How We Work With You

Candidates apply directly through Get A Job.ai. Our talent team will review your profile and conduct an initial screening. If there is a strong match, we will submit your candidacy to our client and guide you through their interview process, which includes:

• 60-minute high-level system design round with an Engineering Manager
• 60-minute panel interview with two Head of Engineering leaders (30 minutes technical deep dive, 30 minutes leadership attributes)
• 60-minute stakeholder management round with a Product Head/VP
• 60-minute technical and culture fit interview with the Co-founder & Group CTO (hiring manager)

Please do not contact the client directly. All communication and coordination will go through Get A Job.ai.

Pay

Compensation details will be discussed during the screening process and are competitive for senior engineering leadership roles in the region.

Get A Job.ai is an equal opportunity recruiter. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive process for all candidates.