Tech Lead – Android Experience Engineering Job Watu Credit

Job Title: Tech Lead – Android Experience Engineering

Date Posted: 15/07/2026

Job Type: Full Time

Employer: Watu Credit

Industry: IT

Salary: Open

Location: Nairobi

Country: Kenya

Deadline: 29/07/2026

Summary:

IT Jobs, Watu Credit Jobs. Looking for an IT job in Kenya? Watu Credit is hiring a Tech Lead – Android Experience Engineering skilled in Android architecture, team leadership, and mobile experience optimization.

Job Summary

Tech Lead is one of the most important individual roles in the engineering organization. You are the technical authority for your squad – you own the architecture, set the quality bar, govern external partners when applicable, and are the primary escalation point for every engineering decision in your domain.

This role carries light people management alongside deep technical ownership. You will have 3-5 direct reports (Backend Engineers, Frontend/Mobile Engineer, QA Engineer). You are responsible for their day-to-day unblocking, their technical growth, and honest feedback on their work. Formal performance reviews and hiring decisions sit with the Head of Engineering – but in practice, your view of each engineer in your squad is the most important input into those decisions. Do not let the word “light” mislead you: if an engineer in your squad is struggling, that is your problem to solve.

You are a peer of the Product Owner, not a subordinate. Product owns What. You own How and When. Sprint commitments are signed off by both of you together. If the roadmap is technically unrealistic, your job is to say so early and clearly.

Squad: Android Experience Engineering

Quick facts for this squad

• Partner governance: Tech Lead governs all architecture, code review, QA strategy, and releases. Development is currently hybrid in-house and external (vendor).
• Primary tech focus: Android · Java/Kotlin · Partner governance · BE API · QA · Release management

Domain responsibilities

• Govern app development: own all architecture decisions, review all PRs, and hold final sign-off on every release. External resources are execution resources, not decision-makers.
• Own the BE API that serves the Android app – designed and maintained by this squad, consumed by the app.
• Own release process and QA strategy for the Android app – release cadence, feature flag strategy, staged rollout, and rollback procedures.
• Own digital experience features delivered through the app – coordinate with the other squads (Device Management Engineering, Payment Engineering, Messaging Engineering, …) for cross squads features and dependencies
• Drive the internal mobile engineering capability – the goal over time is to build sufficient internal Android expertise and deliver the best app experience to our clients

Domain-specific requirements

• Strong Android development background (Java or Kotlin) – you can review any Android PR raised by developers and know whether it is good and architected/designed in the right away
• Experience governing or managing an external mobile development partner – you have been the technical authority over a team that is not your direct report.
• Understanding of Android app release management: Play Store submission, staged rollouts, feature flags, crash monitoring.
• Experience with mobile API design – REST API design optimized for mobile consumption, offline support, and low-bandwidth environments.

Responsibilities

Architecture & technical direction

• Own the technical architecture for your squad’s domain – system design, API contracts, data models, integration patterns, and the Architectural Decision Records that document why.
• Enforce the Watu engineering standards within your squad: GitHub for all code, mandatory PR review, coverage gates, OpenAPI documentation, runbooks, and secrets management.
• Be the squad’s representative to the Platform General Architecture – escalate cross-squad concerns, contribute to shared standards, and ensure your squad’s patterns align with the broader platform direction.

Delivery & quality

• Review and approve all pull requests for your squad. Not as a bottleneck, but as the quality gate. Your name is on everything that ships.
• Define and maintain the squad’s Definition of Done. Work with the embedded QA engineer to ensure quality is built in, not bolted on.
• Own the squad’s release process. Nothing ships without your sign-off – including work from external partners where applicable.
• Drive sprint planning with the Product Owner – translate user stories into technical tasks, surface dependencies, flag risks early.

Partner & vendor governance

• Where your squad governs an external partner, you are the technical point of accountability. The partner executes; you govern. Architecture decisions, code quality, and release timing are owned internally.
• Review partner code via PR access. Nothing a partner ships enters production without your review.

People management (light but real)

• You have 4-6 direct reports: typically 1–2 Backend Engineers, 1–2 Frontend/Mobile Engineers, and 1-2 QA Engineers. They report to you for day-to-day work; the QA Chapter Lead reports to the Head of Engineering for standards but to you operationally.
• Unblock engineers actively – pair on hard problems, review designs before they build, and create an environment where asking for help is normal and fast.
• Give direct, timely feedback to your direct reports. Engineer growth happens through clear, specific feedback delivered close to the moment – not through annual cycles. You are the primary person responsible for the development of the engineers in your squad.
• Your input into performance reviews and hiring decisions carries significant weight – the Head of Engineering will lean heavily on your assessment of each engineer in your squad.
• Model AI-native engineering. Every engineer in your squad is expected to use AI/LLM tools actively. You set the tone for what that looks like in practice.

Requirements

**Essential