About us Upnup is a micro investment app that allows users to automatically invest into assets based on their daily spending habits. The goal is to make upnup the preferred micro-investment app in South Africa, with users seamlessly and autonomously investing into assets of their choosing in the most frictionless means possible.

Here’s a small sample of the assets we aim at bringing on to the upnup investment platform:

• Bitcoin (currently the only asset on platform)
• Ethereum
• USDC (USD stablecoin)
• Equity ETFs/ Equity integration/fractional shares
• Gold
• Additional cryptocurrencies
• Additional unregulated assets
• Additional regulated assets

Join a small, driven and creative team dedicated to delivering an app that provides value and an engaging experience to our users as well as a good return on investment to our investors.

What does working with us look like? Exposure to an innovative product, at the start of its lifecycle. Expanding the product offering both in terms of features as well as geographically. Work with a world class external team while building out our internal team to take over from them. Work remotely but not in isolation Start up culture Room for career growth

About the role Join our team as a senior software developer with the expectation/opportunity to grow into the role of CTO as you build out the internal team and the project scales.

It will be your job initially to immerse yourself in every aspect of the technology by getting your hands dirty with the external development team. Once you fully understand the entire tech stack it will be your responsibility to put our own internal team together to take over from the external team in a phased approach.

You will also be expected to personally get involved in the development of software based on architectural, UX and UI design specifications and other acceptance criteria where required. Your job will however not just be delivering code, but understanding the business requirements and making key infrastructure decisions as we scale. The tech buck will stop with you.

Responsibilities Deliver code according to a product backlog. Agile software development. Technical leadership of a small development team, growing in size over time. Optimise development efforts. Provide architecture design and advice where required, with support from our external teams CTO. Actively contribute to the entire team of product managers, UX practitioners, software developers and QA analysts and engineers. Continuous self-development and expansion of skills. Mentor junior team members. Assist with software and product support. Communicate technical needs and risks effectively outside of the team. Be familiar with devops and infrastructure deployment. Write effective documentation for architecture and infrastructure. Write job specs and lead the recruitment process for an internal team. Own the tech stack responsibility and provide feedback to the management team regarding its stability, development and suitability for scale and purpose.

About you We are looking for somebody who is not just a good developer, but a leader capable of lateral thinking and capable of taking into account the business case for the application while making technical decisions. This position offers the ability to grow into a CTO role once the company achieves a larger degree of scale and as such this position should be filled by somebody who has what it takes to one day fill this role. We don’t expect you to have all the skills and experience just yet to take on this role, but rather just have the temperament, potential and drive to do so.

Knowledge and skills Firstly, you need the skills to take on the responsibilities specified above. You should also have some depth of experience in the technologies we generally use, which includes the following:

AngularJS. Other web frameworks (ReactJS etc) may also be applicable Flutter and Dart for mobile development. API integration through HTTP. REST and REST-like interfaces. GraphQL integration Relational databases and SQL Other databases (time series, graph, document, key-value etc) Use cloud based infrastructure (AWS and Google). This includes compute and data storage elements. Automated deployment infrastructure (Azure DevOps, CodeDeploy etc.)

And these equally important skills Communication skills that allow you to collaborate and explain your process, approach and motivation to various stakeholders, including technical and non-technical people. Able to work well in a team as well as individually. Excited about learning, pushing technical limits and finding new solutions Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills. A propensity to fail fast and learn fast and share both failure and learning with others. Prioritising learning over being right. Understanding others rather than becoming defensive. Understand and have the experience required to build your own internal development team which will operate under your guidance.

Experience Minimum 8 years of relevant software development experience Education, qualification and certifications Relevant B.Sc. or B.Eng. university degree.
Good academic performance exceptional in software development/programming courses

Nice to haves If you tick all the required boxes, the following things will give you an edge: If you’ve started your own business before (it does not matter whether it worked out or not) If you’ve built and released something of your own Active contributions to open source projects A preference for a variety of work and ‘horizontal’ training over deep specialist skills. Aspirations to mentor and coach other developers

Location & commitments The work is a split between remote and in-office work, but will be based in Cape Town, South Africa. Our external development team is based in Stellenbosch. You will be expected to spend at least 2 months with this team to become acquainted with the tech stack. This will largely be remote work, but they may have requirements for you to be present in their office a few days per month..