Senior Software Engineer

Who we are:

Mama Money is a growth stage fintech startup working to help migrant workers in South Africa send money home. Since 2015 we have been providing reliable remittances, at a socially fair price, to those that need it most.

Mama HQ is in beautiful Cape Town, South Africa. We are 131 people strong (and counting) from 19 countries across Africa, Asia, the UK, and Europe. Our culture is built around the well-being of our team members and making a difference in our communities. “Just be lekker!” personifies our approach to work: we trust the wisdom of our talented and diverse team to do what is best for our customers and get the job done responsibly, without pedantic policies.

We’ve been around since 2015 and have earned a few accolades along the way, made some new friends, and expanded our reach. We've had some great times and some tough times, but we continue to focus on helping people rather than maximizing profit.

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join us.

You'll be part of a small team responsible for maintaining our existing services, and implementing new services/features using a microservice architecture approach. Your focus will be on our back-end system that serves as the engine that drives our apps.

We utilize a technology stack of Java, Spring, Spring Boot, and MariaDB (RDS), using a range of Amazon Web Services technologies.

From a process perspective, Mama Money has been growing super fast, which means that a big challenge is scaling our development platforms and practises to support concurrent development of features with multiple teams collaborating.

Based on this, we are adopting Agile principles using the Scrum framework. You'll have to have a strong working understanding of Agile and Scrum mechanics, as well as an understanding of the meaning of what they achieve. You'll participate in all facets of the process, including requirements analysis, creation of stories (we use Jira as our tool of choice), task breakdown, and story point estimates, and join our journey in learning and evolving how we scale up.

As our Senior Software Engineer you will:

• Be a part of investigating and implementing new processes, tools, and technologies to help us grow

• Be involved in the full SDLC of new features

• Take responsibility for test automation (unit and integration) of new code

• Help identify and address technical debt in existing codebases

• Assist with deployment, QA, and support

• Ensure code quality through peer reviews, documentation, and knowledge sharing

TECH STACK:

• Languages: Java 17 (some existing 8)
• Database: MariaDB
• AWS Services: EC2, S3, API Gateway, Cognito, ECS
• Test frameworks and tools: Junit 5, TestContainers and Mockito
• Tools: Jira, Confluence, Postman, Dbeaver, GIT

About you:

• At least 5 years’ experience programming in Java, ideally within a financial services environment

• The ability to work collaboratively in an ever-changing environment

• BSc Computer Science, technical tertiary qualification or significant work experience

• Experience working with microservice architecture

Why Mama:

At Mama Money, the customers & communities we serve are at the heart of all that we do.

We bring our authentic selves to work where we are free to express our diverse identities while staying true to what we believe in and how we feel. Part of that means being able to have difficult conversations when necessary but always remembering to do so with trust, respect, and a positive mindset. Being open to receiving feedback and understanding how this helps us evolve and grow is essential to succeeding in our environment.

We are responsible for ourselves, our behaviour, our delivery, and our output. Although we always aim to move things forward and get $hit done, we start small - taking it step by step and always looking for ways in which we can improve. We know from experience that when we work together towards a common goal, we can achieve anything.

Mama Money is a special place because we care. We care about our customers, we care about the people who work for us and we care about the impact our work has on the world. There are things that we don’t care about too. Things like bureaucracy, discrimination, ego, titles, and silos. We’re a friendly bunch who don’t take ourselves too seriously but we do take our work, and our customers’ hard-earned money, very seriously.

Mama’s values:

1. Customer & Community

2. Authentic

3. Positive Mindset

4. Responsible

5. Togetherness

NB: Applications only open to candidates in Cape Town, or candidates who are actively looking to relocate at their own expense.