Lead developer

Location: Remote | CET timezone. Full time position.

Akvo is looking for the "road captain" of the Tech Solutions team. You provide technical direction, assess trade-offs (build vs buy) on FOSS components, and mentor team members on good engineering practices. As an architect, you have hands-on experience in designing, building and maintaining distributed systems (e.g modular systems, offline data collection, data synchronisation, event systems).

About Akvo

At Akvo, we boost the impact of development programmes through data services and tech solutions. With a team of data and development experts and a proven methodology, we help governments and non-governmental organizations become data driven so that they can improve the results of their programmes and achieve sustainable change, for all.

Main tasks and responsibilities

• Lead and coordinate technical decisions on projects and products
• Evaluate technical design for custom solutions; act as sounding board and counterpoint
• Lead, develop, maintain, scale and evolve all the common/shared services
• Together with the team leads, coordinate architecture concerns between projects and products
• Identify cross cutting concerns that can be moved into the Akvo data platform
• Provide technical direction to the rest of our teams
• Research existing FOSS components and assess the trade-offs (build vs buy)
• Collaborate with QA and Ops teams to make better projects and products, more reliable and maintainable

Requirements and competencies

• You have designed and/or developed complex systems in combination with organisational constraints
• You like mentoring junior and mid level engineers and you’re strong proponent of good software development practices
• You have amazing debugging / troubleshooting capabilities
• You know how to deliver a working product and meet a deadline
• You know more than just programming knowledge and enjoy sharing that (e.g. business domain, agile teams/organisations, project management, budgeting)
• You have Python and JVM experience (diagnose/debug performance and memory problems)
• You have GNU/Linux experience (diagnose/debug performance problems) and you have been exposed to Docker and orchestration tools (Kubernetes)
• You have experience in fast growing organisations and/or the lean startup methodology

Our tech stack

• Programming languages: Python, Clojure, Java, JavaScript (Node.js)
• Databases: PostgreSQL / PostGIS, MySQL, Google App Engine Datastore
• CI/CD: Docker/Kubernetes/GKE, SemaphoreCI
• Misc: Bash, Nginx, OpenResty

What we offer

• This assignment is a commitment of 40 hours/week for a period of one year and can be extended afterwards
• Opportunity to contribute to the design of a growing open-source platform and work with interesting technologies in a creative and entrepreneurial environment together with highly motivated colleagues
• A unique chance to work with tools that contribute to achieving higher efficiency and better results for the development aid sector
• Help build and maintain services used in 60+ countries, making the development aid more transparent and helping to the governance of countries
• Team and organization committed to learning, knowledge sharing, personal growth and working at a sustainable pace
• You will be part of our international Akvo community, with colleagues all over the world.
• Remuneration in line with the market

How to apply

Akvo works with a diverse and international team, and we are committed to promoting diversity and inclusion across our organization. If you think you are the right person for this position, we highly encourage everyone to apply.

Send your motivation letter and resume in English in PDF to Karen Blanken via work@akvo.org with the subject line “Application Lead Developer”. The closing date for this application is 31 May 2022

We aim to fill this position as soon as possible.