Engineering Team at Angaza

Autonomous teams with product ownership

Angaza has four product development teams: three in San Francisco and one in Nairobi. Each team has a high degree of autonomy, works closely together, and owns most of their internal processes. The typical team has several engineers, a product manager, and an engineering manager. Together they own a broad area of functionality. Our "IoT Solutions" team develops everything from embedded firmware to time-series analytics, for example, while our "Network Partnerships" team builds payment functionality across an ever-growing range of digital currency services. Meanwhile, cross-team projects bring together engineers across the company to solve common challenges and address shared concerns.

Angaza engineering culture = rigor + empathy

Building solid software for our users and their typical operating environments requires equal parts rigor and empathy. The majority of our users:

• Use phones that cost less than $50
• Have 3G internet connections, at best, and pay for them by the MB
• Work in the informal economy, some multitasking across multiple small businesses
• May have to travel hours (or days), on foot or by bus, to attend training

Empathy guides our decisions and improves the user experience. Rigor enables successful execution of the decisions we make.

Angazans are interviewed specifically for EQ. We believe it is a hard skill, required to compete successfully in our markets.

Finally, Angazans are encouraged to deepen understanding and empathy by working directly with our customers. We strive to build strong relationships with our widely dispersed user base. While meeting in-person was paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, optional travel is often supported. Whether it’s working out of our Nairobi office or riding a boda in Burundi, these experiences can help connect your daily work to direct improvements in people’s lives.

Candid feedback, given respectfully, accepted seriously

Since our earliest days, Angaza has straddled an ocean. The challenges of keeping our San Francisco and Nairobi teams in sync have shaped our culture. We actively and explicitly practice open communication, both across the entire company and within each smaller team.

We put a lot of energy into ensuring the right conversations are happening between the right people. The entire company joins our monthly all-hands call, which emphasizes transparent communication and live Q&A. Leadership schedules regular office hours, where any topic is fair game. We distribute a biweekly newsletter, featuring both company updates and Angazan personal highlights.

Within the engineering team, much of our written communication comes in the form of PR comments. We provide thoughtful, constructive comments for our colleagues, strive to minimize bikeshedding and rubber-stamping, and foster an environment where every engineer feels both empowered to comment and heard when they do.

In cases of fundamental disagreements, whatever the decision, our style is to ensure that the cost of course correction is not prohibitively expensive, document the discussion, and then defer to the individual or team with the most at stake.

Senior engineers are servant leaders

Angaza believes so strongly in mentorship that we deliberately scale our hiring rate to our mentoring capacity. If we feel we can’t provide the proper support for our engineers to grow into confident and independent colleagues, then we’ll dial back until mentoring bandwidth increases again.

We expect a lot from our senior engineers. Not only must they make strong technical contributions, but they must actively grow the next crop of leaders. In return, senior engineers have the opportunity to hone their own skills, shape the organization, and have significant impact. They spearhead our most challenging projects and they are given wide latitude when doing so.

More broadly, from frequent pairing to our biweekly engineering practicum, Angaza culture is infused with a commitment to helping engineers maximize their rates of personal growth.

Building for the emerging billion

Our work is all about making life-changing products available to anyone, anywhere. We understand how structures in society can restrict opportunity. Angaza is committed to removing and countering bias in our hiring practices so that candidates from underrepresented backgrounds are evaluated fairly.

We can also share the results of a simple gender survey. Women are:

• ⅔ of our founders
• over half of our leadership team
• ⅓ of our engineers

We don’t focus on pedigree. Engineers on our team have had backgrounds in public planning and policy, fine arts, classics, Arabic, French – and more traditional computer science education, too. We welcome anyone who believes in our mission: increasing access to life-changing products for anyone, anywhere.

Work horses, not show horses

Angazans tend to be quietly impressive. You’d never guess that we’ve built autonomous robots, designed the Tesla UI, helped scale Yahoo 14x, contributed to the Linux kernel, established Grameen’s Kenya operations, or been named to Forbes’ “30 under 30” list.

In fact, typing out that list felt painfully and distinctly non-Angazan, and we’d be just as happy never to do it again. Angazans come from a broad base of backgrounds, but we're all bound together by our shared goal. Angazans all join Angaza for the same reason. Most Angazans have the ability and privilege to choose from a variety of professional options, but the only thing you’ll hear us talking about is how we can solve the problems in front of us.

A family-friendly, results-based management culture

Angaza offers flexible PTO (most people take around four weeks a year), paid parental leave (six weeks for all new parents and an additional six weeks for mothers giving birth), and an effective distributed culture that permits remote work. If you have any questions about working here while raising a family, you can ask one of the many Angazans who do.

As a broader team, we value personal connection. We get together in person when we can. We’ve played arcade games together, conquered escape rooms, gathered for picnics, and played frisbee. We hold regular team board game and movie nights. Within the company, you’ll often hear Angazans talking about “embracing their inner tembo”: this one of our five core company values. Tembo is the Swahili word for elephant. We take the mentality of being a part of the herd and supporting everyone in it.

Quality ∧ (Scope ⊕ Speed)

Angaza engineers have a strong bias towards clarity over complexity and simplicity over cleverness. We deliver deep, constructive code reviews; employ continuous integration and blue/green deploys; and prefer care over speed when it comes to production. Our platform is essential to our customers. As a result, we strive to build our engineering culture on a bedrock of quality.

Engineers have wide latitude to work across the entire codebase. We attempt to fix entire classes of bugs at a time. When mistakes do occur, we practice a no-blame postmortem culture.