Head of Engineering, Rewards

About this job

<p><strong>Who we are</strong></p> <p>Moniepoint Inc. is Africa’s all-in-one financial platform, helping 20 million businesses and individuals access seamless payments, banking, credit, cross-border, and business management tools each month. </p> <p>As Nigeria’s largest merchant acquirer, we power most of the country’s point-of-sale (POS) transactions.

Key details

• Through our subsidiaries, Moniepoint Inc. processes over $250 billion in digital payment transaction value annually.</p> <p><strong>About The Role</strong></p> <p>Rewards is one of the most strategically important platforms at Moniepoint, and it is being built into a dedicated charter with its own engineering and product leadership.
• The platform sits at the centre of our retention strategy across a user base of approximately 23 million people.</p> <p>Today the platform does one thing: cashback.
• It works, but it has barely scratched the surface of what rewards can be, and the cashback product itself is not yet built to the depth it deserves.
• The ambition is to evolve it into a full rewards, retention, engagement and personalisation platform — and to do that across the full 360 degrees of our network.
• That means rewards for our business customers, rewards for our consumer customers, and rewards for the sales agents who drive our distribution.
• Very few companies get to design this from close to a blank page at this scale.</p> <p>The Head of Engineering owns that platform end to end.
• You will inherit a team of nine engineers, including an Engineering Manager, and build the organisation out from there — the current expectation is a minimum of three product units and upwards of 25 people, though the eventual shape is genuinely yours to define.
• Your first objective is to get the best possible performance out of the cashback product we already have.
• From there, you will work with Growth, Sales and Marketing to determine what we build for acquisition and retention, and roll it out across every customer we serve.</p> <p>This is a consumer-facing product engineering role, and that is the most important thing to understand about it.
• Rewards is won or lost on experimentation, personalisation, and the quality of the experience in a customer's hands.
• We are looking for a leader who has built and shipped direct-to-consumer products at scale, who is fluent in experimentation and A/B testing, and who has real depth in front-end and mobile engineering — not a purely backend platform leader.</p> <p>Moniepoint runs a Domain CTO model.
• We view our Heads of Engineering as the CTO of their domain: you own the technical roadmap, the architecture, the delivery, and the organisation beneath you.
• You will have full autonomy over engineering strategy, architecture, hiring, operating cadence and roadmap trade-offs.</p> <p>You will report functionally to our Group CTO, with a dual reporting line into the Product leader for Rewards.
• That second line is a delivery relationship rather than a seniority one — engineering and product are peers here, and you will build the team to full capacity together.
• Your responsibilities as Head of Engineering, Rewards includes:</p> <ul> <li>Owning the technical strategy, architecture and roadmap for the Rewards Platform end to end.</li> <li>Improving the performance, reliability and depth of the existing cashback product as an immediate first priority.</li> <li>Evolving cashback into a broader rewards, retention, engagement and personalisation platform serving business customers, consumer customers and sales agents.</li> <li>Building the engineering organisation from its current base - structuring product units, hiring engineers and Engineering Managers, and leading through those managers as the team scales.</li> <li>Establishing a strong experimentation culture: A/B testing, cohort analysis, and measurement that lets the team learn quickly what actually changes customer behaviour.</li> <li>Working closely with Growth, Sales and Marketing to translate acquisition and retention objectives into product and engineering initiatives.</li> <li>Owning the customer-facing experience of rewards across mobile and web, including how quickly and reliably customers receive what they have earned.</li> <li>Define architecture standards, engineering processes and quality metrics, and own the engineering health of the domain — incidents, production defects, deployment frequency, change failure rate, and developer experience.</li> <li>Build the platform to serve customers across multiple geographies as Moniepoint expands.</li> <li>Partner with Product to define the rewards-specific metrics and OKRs that do not yet exist, and hold the team to them.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Who You Are </strong></p> <ul> <li>Direct-to-consumer product engineering at scale.
• You have built and shipped products used directly by large consumer audiences, and you understand what moves engagement and retention.
• This is the defining requirement of the role.</li> <li>Genuine front-end and mobile depth.
• You have led or personally built consumer-facing mobile and web experiences.
• A backend-only background, however strong, is not what this role needs.</li> <li>Experimentation and growth engineering.
• Hands-on experience running A/B tests, feature flagging, and measurement frameworks, and using the results to drive product decisions rather than to justify them.</li> <li>At least 5 years of experience managing managers — leading an engineering organisation through other engineering leaders, not a single team.</li> <li>Hands-on technical leadership.
• You are still close to the code.
• We expect a meaningful proportion of hands-on engineering time and technical credibility with the engineers you lead.</li> <li>10+ years of overall software engineering experience, with at least 5 years leading engineering teams through growth phases.</li> <li>Comfort with our backend environment — Java and Spring Boot — and the ability to lead backend engineers credibly, even if it is not where your own depth sits.</li> <li>Experience building and scaling an engineering organisation from a small base, including hiring and developing Engineering Managers.</li> <li>Strong collaboration with commercial stakeholders — growth, marketing and sales — and the ability to translate business objectives into engineering work.</li> <li>Rewards, loyalty, gamification, personalisation or growth platform experience is a strong advantage but is not required.</li> <li>Fintech or payments experience is an advantage, not a requirement.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Cultural Alignment</strong></p> <p>As well, we assess every candidate across eight dimensions that define how great leaders operate at Moniepoint.
• We look for evidence of all eight throughout the process, not just in a single conversation.</p> <ul> <li>Customer Obsession: Build deep empathy for users.
• Solve problems intuitively, and fix root causes, not just tickets.</li> <li>Craft: Master the fundamentals.
• Reason from first principles, make trade-offs explicit, and raise the bar on quality.</li> <li>Systemisation: Turn repeating decisions into scalable mechanisms.
• Reduce cognitive load and raise engineering quality.</li> <li>Urgency: Move with disciplined speed.
• Act autonomously within scope, remove friction, and escalate risks early.</li> <li>Ownership: Treat the platform as your own.
• Take initiative across boundaries and follow through without reminders.</li> <li>No Ego: Put the mission