Head of Engineering

Reports to: CEO

Location: UK, remote

Role type: Full time, permanent

Salary: £90,000 - £120,000

Who are Elephant?

Elephant builds mobile, digital infrastructure for public health systems across the Global South. Founded in 2018 by doctors and driven by technical expertise, we are building a platform - ElephantOS - that improves outcomes, reduces costs and makes healthcare accessible for all. We currently have employees in Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan and the UK. And we’re backed by leading VC firms including Novastar Ventures, General Catalyst, LocalGlobe, First Minute, SeedCamp, Push Ventures, Speed Invest and Manta Ray.

A short case study of our work in Kenya can be found here.

Our company has deep ethical roots, combining science with ambition and social purpose. Our culture is based on bias for action and collaboration; openness and candour; passion and kindness.

We are a small band of experts. This inspires our purpose as we focus on delivering solutions for real-world health problems. We are open, creative and collaborative, and we believe that products, whether used in Sudan or San Francisco, should be intuitive and beautiful.

If this is a mission and a company you can stand behind, keep reading!

Requirements

We're looking for someone to lead our engineering team. You will oversee all aspects of engineering, from application to platform to data engineering and data science. You should be comfortable managing and growing a global, remote-first team, and also have a passion for our problem space and markets.

In the first 6-12 months, this role will be much more hands on. You will plan and execute new features alongside your engineering team, working closely with product, design, data science and engineering to improve our application for our users and customers. We expect this to be no more than 50% of your time.

After the first 6-12 months, we’re expecting you to solely focus on building out our engineering function, hiring and nurturing an incredible team, setting technical vision alongside our Product and Design leaders, and working closely with our senior leadership team to move the business forward in line with our culture and values.

Our technology

We’re tackling complex but fascinating technical problems. Due to resource constraints in our markets, software efficiency is crucial. Internet connectivity and power isn’t guaranteed, so we’re constantly innovating to make sure our product “just works” in all types of environments. This also means that we can’t always use off-the-shelf solutions. This kind of technical environment should excite you.

On the frontend expect to find a single page React application. Our React app communicates with our backend services via graphQL.

On the backend you’ll find NodeJS microservices written in TypeScript. We use Kafka to enable our event-driven architecture, and MongoDB, PostgreSQL, S3 and Elasticsearch for data storage and retrieval. Elephant’s platform is multi-cloud: we deploy our services to data centres around the world using ArgoCD and Kubernetes. We’ve invested heavily in our data platform and are using Google BigQuery and Python to provide our customers with amazing health system insights.

As we scale, the quality of our data becomes more and more valuable. We’ve invested heavily in a strong security and data engineering foundation, laying the groundwork for a groundbreaking product vision which will help our markets leapfrog others in healthcare quality and access.

What you'll need

Experience as a software engineer and engineering leader.

This role might be a great fit if you:

• Can commit to an exciting but challenging ride. We’re tackling hard problems and need you to be resilient for your team and the company.
• Want to travel to our markets (i.e. Kenya, Nigeria) to experience problems first hand. We expect this to be a few weeks per year max, but can extend to more if you're interested
• Are an engineering leader with proven experience in a fast-paced, high growth environment, leading and growing a team of high-performing technologists
• Believe that leadership means distributing power and enabling others.
• Love building and leading great engineering teams.
• Are curious about engineering strategy, ways of working, best practices and delivery.
• Love pushing yourself out of your comfort zone.
• Bring empathy to all that you do.
• Have an impeccable track record of ethics.

Benefits

• We aim to provide all members of our team with flexibility. We have a remote first policy, with access to office space in central London for collaborating with team members.
• Online mental health support through partnership with Self Space.
• A culture of kindness, candour, good humour and respect.
• Investment in personal growth: if there’s a course, book or conference you want to attend, let your manager know, and we’ll do our best to cover the cost.
• Employee pension scheme with Aviva (including salary sacrifice)
• 25 days holidays + public holidays.
• Opportunities to travel to meet our customers around the world.

We take progression seriously at Elephant; with strong performance, your salary and benefits will grow with the company.

Equal Opportunity Employer

Elephant is an equal opportunity employer and we are proud to create an environment where everyone can be their best. All qualified applicants will be considered regardless of their age, race, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, genetics or disability. We do not tolerate discrimination or harassment of any kind.

When you apply to Elephant you should feel comfortable telling us about yourself, including how you like to be addressed. Please let us know if you require any special accommodation to be made for the interview process: we want to set you up for success and let you put your best foot forward.