Do you want to use your engineering skills to safeguard democracies and empower citizens across Africa?
Code for Africa (CfA) has an immediate vacancy for a full-time Senior Software Engineer to join our TechLab.
Candidates must excel at juggling multiple priorities while shipping high‑quality code on time. You spot opportunities to automate repetitive tasks and document your processes so others can follow. When production issues arise, you can quickly triage, troubleshoot and trace problems to their root cause.
The successful candidates will work as part of a multinational and multilingual team using digital collaboration tools to create content for a global audience and international media partners.
Required: minimum requirements include:
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or a related technical discipline, or equivalent professional experience.
- Five or more years building production systems with Python plus either TypeScript or JavaScript.
- Experience deploying containerised services to at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP or Azure) using Docker/Dokku, Terraform or Pulumi.
- Framework fluency: Django REST (or FastAPI), Next.js (or similar React meta‑framework), and Vega-Lite (or similar data visualisation platforms such as D3.js).
- Proficiency with relational and document databases such as Postgres, MongoDB, and queueing systems like RabbitMQ.
- Working knowledge of observability stacks (Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry) and security best practices (OWASP, SSO, secrets management).
- Track record of leading project teams and shipping well‑tested, well‑documented code in an agile environment.
- Excellent written and verbal communication in English.
Preferred: candidates who are able to demonstrate the following will have an advantage:
- Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field.
- Experience with open‑source or civic‑tech projects, media or non‑profit environments.
- Hands-on experience with distributed task queues (Celery or Dask), data‑engineering pipelines (Airflow or Dagster), event orchestration (Prefect or Temporal) and geospatial stacks (PostGIS, GeoJSON, vector tiles).
- Experience building and deploying AI applications in production, with working knowledge of areas such as Large Language Models (LLMs), generative AI, and/or AI agent frameworks.
- French, Arabic, KiSwahili or other widely spoken African languages.
Language and Location Requirements:
- Location: This role is open to remote candidates across Africa. For those preferring an office environment, CfA has labs in Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa.
- Languages: Professional fluency in English (written and verbal) is required.
- Preferred but not required: Proficiency in Arabic, French, KiSwahili, or other major African languages is a valuable asset.
About the Role:
The successful candidates will join the TechLab. The TechLab is CfA’s specialist software engineering team, developing digital services for the organisation and its human rights partners. Working with our distributed team of engineers, designers, and product managers, you’ll build and scale civic technology, digital democracy solutions, and AI-powered tools that directly empower citizens and make tangible social impact across Africa.
You’ll help shape the technical direction of key products including:
- CivicSignal (our ML/NLP powered media analysis tools),
- sensors.AFRICA (our environmental monitoring platforms), and
- Our data visualisation apps such as PesaYetu and HURUmap.
Responsibilities: Your daily responsibilities will include:
- Own the architecture, implementation and operation of multi‑tenant web and data platforms, including REST and GraphQL APIs, event streams and real‑time dashboards.
- Drive DevOps practices: CI/CD, infrastructure as code, automated testing and observability
- Lead the technical roadmap for integrating LLMs, retrieval‑augmented generation and agent frameworks into CfA products and platforms.
- Mentor and unblock a distributed team of engineers through code reviews, pair programming and design workshops.
- Establish engineering standards, including data governance and responsible AI guidelines.
- Lead open‑source contributions: review community pull requests and upstream improvements across our public repositories.
What We Offer:
- A competitive salary, subject to experience, with opportunities for performance-based growth, both in terms of career path and public stature.
- Medical insurance cover, underwritten by a remote-first provider to ensure cover wherever you are
- A dynamic workplace, with a transnational team, occasional international travel, and generous vacation benefits.
- Ongoing opportunities to learn new cutting-edge skills and techniques/technologies to future-proof yourself in a rapidly evolving industry.
- A chance to shine on a global stage, writing for international audiences and interacting with colleagues around the world.
What We Offer:
- A competitive salary, subject to experience, with opportunities for performance-based growth, both in terms of career path and public stature.
- Medical insurance cover, underwritten by a remote-first provider to ensure cover wherever you are
- A dynamic workplace, with a transnational team, occasional international travel, and generous vacation benefits.
- Ongoing opportunities to learn new cutting-edge skills and techniques/technologies to future-proof yourself in a rapidly evolving industry.
- A chance to shine on a global stage, writing for international audiences and interacting with colleagues around the world.
What to expect during hiring
- 60‑minute culture and technical screen.
- A take-home code assignment, designed to take approximately 120 minutes of focused work, which you can complete at your convenience within a 72-hour window.
- 60‑minute assignment review, values and leadership interview.
How to apply:
Complete this form using this link and attach your CV, GitHub handle, and a brief cover letter (optional). Applications close on June 30, 2025 and will be reviewed on a rolling basis.
About Us:
Code for Africa (CfA) is the continent’s largest network of indigenous African civic technology and investigative data journalism laboratories, with over 120 staff in 26 countries, who build digital democracy solutions that are intended to give citizens unfettered access to actionable information that empowers them to make informed decisions and that strengthen civic engagement for improved public governance and accountability.
This includes building infrastructure such as the continent’s largest open data portal, open.AFRICA, and largest open source civic software portal, commons.AFRICA, as well as the largest repository of investigative document-based evidence, source.AFRICA, as well as incubating initiatives as diverse as the africanDRONE network that gives citizens their own ‘eyes in the sky’, the PesaCheck fact-checking initiative in 12 African countries, and the sensors.AFRICA remote-sensing citizen science initiative to combat air/water pollution.
CfA also incubates the African Network of Centres for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR), as an association of the continent’s best investigative newsrooms, ranging from large traditional mainstream media to smaller specialist units. ANCIR member newsrooms investigate crooked politicians, organised crime and big business. The iLAB is ANCIR’s in-house digital forensic unit, with teams in east, south and west Africa. ANCIR uses its resources to strengthen newsrooms’ own internal capacity, by providing access to the world’s best whistleblower encryption and investigative semantic analysis technologies, as well as skills development, and seed grants for cross-border collaboration.
At CfA, we don’t just accept differences – we celebrate it, we support it, and we thrive on it for the benefit of our employees, our products and our community. CfA is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.
To all recruitment agencies: CfA does not accept agency resumes. Please do not forward resumes to our employment application line, CfA employees or any other CfA contact. CfA is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.
Please note: Due to high volumes of applications, we are unable to respond to each one individually. If you are selected for an interview, we will contact you.