About Nile

What we do

At Nile, we see a future where Africa’s producers can access markets with the biggest need for their products. By integrating regional food systems, we aim to make nutritious food more accessible to consumers across the continent and beyond. Nile.ag is a B2B e-commerce platform that enables direct trades between buyers and sellers of fresh produce. Our platform makes it easy and safe to trade fresh produce with multiple producers across different regions.

How it's going

Since Nile’s inception, approximately 30 million kilograms of fruits and vegetables have been traded on the Nile platform, with buyers originating from five countries and 35 towns and cities across Southern Africa. Nile’s services are used by farmers of all sizes, from small-scale farmers to large commercial farmers, with buyers ranging from large South African-listed companies to small family-owned retailers and wholesalers. Nile also operates in Botswana, Namibia, Eswatini and Mozambique. Nile is a fast growing, but also well funded startup, raising $5.1 million early in 2022 from Naspers Foundry, alongside new investors, Platform Investment Partners, Raba Capital and Base Capital.

To build on our early success we are now growing the team exponentially and expanding across the African continent. As a new hire you will help us during this next phase as we:

• Scale our payment systems across many jurisdictions including advanced credit, prepaid and EFT payments in many currencies.
• Continue to improve the performance, UX and feature set of our marketplace across backend, mobile and desktop with a world class experience for buyers large and small. For example: PWAs for live push notifications as the market prices are moving (frontend), improvements to our event driven microservices architecture (backend) and more.
  • Strengthen our complex logistics systems including predictive models and the APIs and interface to interact with them to best support our sellers of all shapes and sizes.
  • Work on our R&D initiatives including Computer Vision based quality control to better include small scale farmers, IoT devices in our hubs to support the quality control systems, price and supply prediction based on the data we gather from our market and external sources and more.

Why Work For Us

You will be part of a cross-functional and highly motivated team with contributors including product owners, designers, Go developers and TypeScript developers. You will be able to work remotely from anywhere within the Africa, EU or Near East timezone. We are building a high-performing team that is passionate about transforming Africa’s food systems. Our founding team combines experience in E‑commerce, Finance and Software Development at world leading companies - including Amazon, JP Morgan, and Luno.

Our Culture

We strive to be a passionate, open and honest team. We understand that our success depends on a culture that supports and motivates our people. We are prioritising hiring a diverse group of people, and creating a culture where their perspectives influence & improve our products.

From day one and as our team grows we are committed to building a world class team, and an environment where every member of the team feels comfortable giving feedback, learning from, and teaching any other Niler. We want to be a team that cares about one another, and cares about our customers.

Finally you will be an early team member, and you will be able to help shape our culture according to what type of company you want to work for.

Our Engineering Processes

We run weekly planning sessions based on a kanban workflow. Code is shipped via continuous integration and continuous delivery, deploying to production (in GCP) every single day. As a startup you will be able to see the direct impact your code has on our customers and the industry. You will also have the opportunity to influence the direction of the company, and our codebase over time, building deep domain knowledge.

We are proudly a remote first product team. All of our processes are optimised for distributed and asynchronous communication. We use rich documents and proposals (Notion), which alongside code review (GitHub) provides the foundation that a) keeps our distributed developers on the same page, and b) provides robust avenues for new ideas from the entire team, taking advantage of our diversity. We supplement this with Slack as tool for group updates (not instant messaging to avoid message fatigue). Despite this emphasis on asynchronous principles we have a lot to talk about regularly, especially as an early stage startup, so we have regular video calls (Google Meet/Slack). We also ideally try and get the entire team together in person for a week or two at least once a year, in our experience this connection helps a great deal in facilitating the remote communication that happens the rest of the time.

Our Hiring Process

This is what you can expect when interviewing with us.

Our interview process has the following stages:

1. 30min intro call - here we make sure your needs and expectations align with what we can offer.
2. 45min interview - here we get more details on the items listed in your CV to gauge your level of knowledge.
3. Choose a) 45min problem solving interview or b) take home test - here we gauge how easy it will be to communicate with you, learn from you and teach you things.

That's it! Note that all interviews are conducted over video call.
A bit more about the technical assessment:

During the process, you are likely to meet the following members of our team:

What will they be looking for?

How to make a good first impression:

How long does our interview process usually take, from first call to offer stage?

If you need any additional information on our interview process, please reach out to us directly.
Alternatively, please take a look at our careers page to get to know us better