The Opportunity

Do you want to just build software, or do you want to build software that helps people improve their lives? Viamo is a mission-driven organization and communication platform that is supporting people in geographies with minimal access to the Internet (take a look at some examples of our impact [ Link removed ] ). With everything that has happened in the past two years, many of us have reconsidered what we want to do with our lives and how we can make a meaningful impact. Viamo is a place where you can work with talented, driven and thoughtful people to improve the world for the better. If that sounds intriguing, please read on…

We are looking for a passionate and experienced Senior or Staff-level Data-focused Engineer who will provide their Data-related expertise to our entire team (in a role that we call a “Chapter Lead”). You will be helping build software that is currently used in 40+ countries (primarily across Asia, Africa and the Caribbean) to give connectivity to people with limited technology. You will be part of a team that is building, scaling, and maintaining Viamo's products including our large-scale web application and communication platform that processes 4 million+ interactions a day and positively impacts millions of lives. In our years ahead, we are aiming to scale our platform strategy to go beyond sharing information: connecting 100 million active users to vital services and many of the benefits of the digital economy.

All our end-users need is a simple mobile phone and a mobile connection to get access to vital information and services. Through channels such as text messaging and Interactive Voice Response (as well as internet-based channels such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp), end-users who are farmers, expectant mothers, small business owners and others can get access to life-changing information. Throughout the COVID pandemic, Viamo’s platform was key to efforts in many countries to get public health information out to hard-to-reach populations. 

At Viamo, all Engineers are part of one or more “Chapters”, which are guilds for a domain specialization, such as Data Engineering. We are looking to hire a Data “Chapter Lead”, which means that you will be responsible for guiding all of our Data Engineers and some Full Stack Engineers who want to improve their Data-related knowledge and skills. As such, you will use your expertise and passion to act as a multiplier for the output of the Engineering team. 

You will also get involved in helping out with technical designs, giving assistance to Engineers on deliverables, conducting code reviews and, when necessary, contributing code yourself. Since our Data Chapter is fairly small at the moment, you will do more Individual Contributor work at the outset of your role, decreasing over time as the Data team grows. Your efforts will ensure that our applications create a delightful user experience for our users and are and are highly scalable, available, resilient and perform well on all devices.

We are looking for an Engineer who has been focusing on Data-related development (relational and object-store databases, analytics, etc.) for 10+ years and, ideally, has formal training in Computer Science or Software Engineering.  Although we are looking for someone with general Data-related expertise, because of the nature of this role as a Chapter Lead, we have a strong preference for experience with our key Data tech stack components. We aim to power-up our developers with modern efficient frameworks, which currently include:

• MySQL
• BigQuery
• Google Data Studio
• PHP / Laravel
• REST and GraphQL APIs

(The list above are the key Data-related technologies; other technologies in our stack include AWS, Redis, RabbitMQ, Docker, Ansible, Jenkins, BitBucket, Github, Vue.js, Typescript, ESLint, Webpack, etc.)

Strong written and verbal communication skills are a prerequisite, as we are a very team-oriented company working remotely with colleagues across the world, so clear communication is central to our success. We appreciate people who balance thinking long-term and pursuing technical excellence, and are focused on delivering value to users. We are experienced Agile / Scrum practitioners and we operate in multi-disciplinary product crews towards shared success.