Senior Engineering Manager, Platform (Backend)

Location: Fully remote; must overlap with East Africa Time and US Eastern Time by at least 3 hours. Travel to a country of operation is required approximately 3–4 times per year. U.S. and U.K. visa sponsorship or transfer of sponsorship is not available.

U.S. base salary: $181,130 annually. U.K. base salary: £124,370 annually. Kenya base salary: $112,350 annually. Compensation benchmarks for other countries are shared during the hiring process.

Company

hirify.global is a global nonprofit delivering direct cash assistance to people living in poverty across multiple countries.

What you will do

• Manage and grow a team of 5–7 senior software engineers through goal setting, feedback, career development, performance management, recruiting, and onboarding.
• Own technical outcomes for a platform domain, including delivery, reliability, architecture, and major technical decisions.
• Partner with product counterparts to balance feature delivery, technical debt, infrastructure investment, and engineering velocity.
• Drive operational excellence across on-call, incident response, code quality, testing, AI, and deployment practices.
• Represent engineering with leadership and cross-functional stakeholders, translating technical realities into business decisions.
• Review designs and guide technical trade-offs while preserving autonomy for a highly senior team.

Requirements

• English required.
• 3+ years managing software engineers through full delivery cycles.
• 8+ years of industry experience building production software, with a strong backend foundation in databases, cloud services, and APIs.
• Experience recruiting, coaching, developing, and retaining inclusive, high-performing engineering teams during periods of growth.
• Strong technical judgment, architecture review experience, and the ability to evaluate technical and non-technical trade-offs.
• Ability to work with non-technical stakeholders and build product-development practices in a growing organization.

Nice to have

• Experience with mobile money or banking integrations, payment orchestration, financial tracking, and reconciliation.
• Experience building offline-first tools for low-connectivity field environments.
• Experience with agentic engineering and product development for low-income or historically marginalized communities.

Culture & Benefits

• Candid, analytical, and non-hierarchical working environment.
• High ownership, professional growth, open debate, and continuous learning.
• Remote work with flexible scheduling, provided sufficient team overlap is maintained.
• Annual bonus targeted at 15% and an annual benefits stipend, varying by country.
• Safeguarding, reference, background, and sanctions checks may be part of the pre-hire process.