Senior Backend Engineer, Smile Identity
Africa-focused verification platform
Job no longer available
Africa-focused verification platform
21-100 employees
Job no longer available
21-100 employees
Company mission
Smile Identity's mission is to make the benefits of a modern digital lifestyle universally accessible by expanding trust in underserved markets.
Role
Who you are
- You love to code
- You are comfortable working independently with periodic guidance from engineering & product teams
- You are a strong believer in automated testing and CI/CD
- You are entrepreneurial — you take initiative, solve problems and love to troubleshoot
- You are a great collaborator and can communicate effectively. You enjoy teaching and learning from your colleagues
- You are focused on customer success and building a product that meets the needs of our developers community
- You are a seeker of truth
Desirable
- 5+ years experience in Node.js
- Experience with AWS Lambda, Postgres, and DynamoDB preferred
- Experience with Serverless orchestration frameworks such as Serverless Framework, SAM, Begin.js preferred
- Experience with modern infrastructure, tooling, and instrumentation including:
- Docker
- Kubernetes
- Sentry
- Segment
- Github Actions
- Experience in a high-growth team and/or startup experience
- Entrepreneurial spirit, a willingness to speak up and speak the truth
- Ability to communicate and prioritize effectively with a distributed team around the wo
What the job involves
- We are looking for a talented software engineer with a passion for developer-focused and intuitive SaaS products. The job is to help us evolve and expand our product to delight our customers as they discover and integrate our service. The work is remote with opportunities to visit and work out of our offices around the world. Our team is and has always been heavily distributed across the globe
- This is a US-based role, however, because you will be working with our team in Africa as well as our US-based team, candidates on the East Coast may find the timezone a better fit. Most meetings start at 10am eastern time
- Work with our product & engineering team in the SF Bay Area, New York, London, Lagos, Nairobi, and Cape Town to turn ideas and customer feedback into Smile ID services and integrations and continuously improve our developer and customer experience. You will work alongside our world class computer vision and machine learning team to productize identity verification across Africa. Your north star? An incredible developer experience that drives customer success
Our take
An estimated half a billion Africans have no access to formal identification, cutting them off from essential services. Smile Identity uses artificial intelligence to provide ID verification and Know Your Client (KYC) compliance for African financial institutions.
Smile’s product-market fit took some time. With no playbook to follow, it continues to carve out innovative solutions for a systematically overlooked community. Within four years of conception, Smile existed across six markets in Africa, covering over 250 million identities and verification for 15 different types of IDs, whilst delivering over one million identity checks each month - successfully securing its goal of reaching underserved markets.
Whilst competitor Youverify claims to be the market leader in ID verification, Smile is growing its market position, and is used by many fast growing companies across a wide range of industries. With integrations to more ID databases than any other KYC provider in Africa, and fresh funding for expanding its product and engineering teams, Smile Identity has proved its abilities and positioned itself well to expand into the future.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
15% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 4 rounds)
Feb 2023
$20m
SERIES B
Jul 2021
$7m
SERIES A
Total funding: $35m
Company benefits
- Offices in Cape Town, London, Nairobi and Lagos
- Annual off-site & quarterly regional hangouts
- Company sponsored health insurance plans or medical stipend where applicable
- Annual salary reviews
- Flexible hours and remote/hybrid work
- Paid time-off - our comprehensive leave policy caters to different leave types
- Referral Bonus
- Annual learning budget
Company HQ
Produce and Waterfront, Oakland, CA
Leadership
Mark Straub
(CEO)Khosla Impact Partner. Former Analyst at Banc of America Securities and India-based microfinance venture firm Lok Capital. Before co-founding Smile Identity they were an Associate & Analyst for the Draper Fisher Jurvetson Growth Fund.
William Bares
(Senior Advisor)Was the company's CTO from foundation, stepping into an advisory role in 2022. Previously spent seven years as VP Software and System Engineering at Verayo.
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