Smatech Group is looking for a Senior Full Stack Developer to help build and scale our product portfolio. You'll work across the stack, from backend services and data pipelines to modern frontend interfaces, while championing AI-assisted development practices that help the whole engineering team ship faster without sacrificing quality.
This is a senior, hands-on role for someone who can own features end-to-end, mentor other developers, and bring modern engineering practices including AI agent-assisted workflows into everyday delivery.
Key Responsibilities
• Design, build, and maintain scalable full stack applications across Java (backend services) and Node.js, with React.js and Next.js on the frontend.
• Design and optimize PostgreSQL schemas, queries, and data models for performance and reliability at scale.
• Build and maintain event-driven architectures using Apache Kafka for real-time data processing and service-to-service communication.
• Own CI/CD pipelines using Git and GitHub Actions, ensuring fast, safe, and repeatable deployments.
• Integrate AI agents and AI-assisted workflows (e.g., coding copilots, automated code review, agentic testing/documentation tools) into the development lifecycle to increase team velocity.
• Collaborate with product, design, and other engineers to translate business requirements into technical solutions.
• Write clean, well-tested, maintainable code and enforce this standard through code reviews.
• Contribute to architectural decisions, technical roadmaps, and engineering best practices.
• Mentor mid-level and junior developers; support hiring and technical interviews as needed.
• Monitor, debug, and improve the performance, security, and scalability of production systems.
Required Skills & Experience
• 5+ years of professional full stack development experience.
• Strong proficiency in Java (Spring Boot or equivalent enterprise framework).
• Strong proficiency in Node.js for backend/API development.
• Proficiency in React.js and Next.js, including SSR/SSG, routing, and state management patterns.
• Solid experience with PostgreSQL, including schema design, indexing, and query optimization.
• Practical experience with Apache Kafka (producers/consumers, topics, partitioning, event-driven design).
• Strong command of Git and GitHub Actions (or similar CI/CD tooling) for automated build, test, and deployment pipelines.
• Demonstrated experience using AI coding tools and agentic workflows (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or similar) to accelerate development, testing, or documentation.
• Solid understanding of REST/GraphQL API design and integration.
• Comfortable working in a fast-paced, product-driven environment with evolving requirements.
Modern / Nice-to-Have Skills
• Containerization and orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes.
• Cloud platforms: AWS, GCP, or Azure (compute, storage, managed databases, IAM).
• Infrastructure as Code: Terraform or similar.
• Experience with microservices architecture and API gateways.
• Familiarity with observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Datadog, or similar).
• Automated testing practices: unit, integration, and end-to-end testing (Jest, Playwright, Cypress, JUnit).
• Experience with payment gateway integrations, particularly mobile money or African payment rails (e.g., EcoCash, ZimSwitch), is a strong plus.
• Familiarity with prompt engineering and building lightweight internal tools/agents to automate repetitive engineering tasks.
• Understanding of security best practices (OWASP, authentication/authorization patterns like OAuth2/JWT).
• Experience with feature flagging and progressive rollout strategies.
• Exposure to CDNs and video/streaming delivery infrastructure is a plus, given Smatech's media platform work.
Soft Skills
• Strong problem-solving skills and ability to work independently on ambiguous problems.
• Clear communicator, comfortable presenting technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders.
• Collaborative mindset - works well across product, design, and engineering functions.
• Proactive about identifying inefficiencies and proposing modern tooling or process improvements.
• Comfortable mentoring others and raising the technical bar of the team.
Qualifications
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience).
• Relevant certifications (cloud, Kafka, or AI/ML tooling) are a plus but not required.
What Smatech Offers
• Opportunity to work on high-impact, high-visibility products across entertainment tech and national digital transformation projects.
• A team that actively invests in modern tooling, including AI-assisted development.
• Room to shape architecture and engineering culture as the company scales.
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