Principal Engineer

Who we are
Chowdeck is an on-demand delivery service for Africa. We help vendors deliver food, medicine, and groceries seamlessly while also providing customers with a platform to order from their favourite vendors.
At Chowdeck, we deeply value growth, excellence, speed, and empathy. Our team is a tight-knit team of creative problem solvers who are smart, kind and committed to helping each other grow.
Where you come in
We're looking for an experienced Principal Engineer to help shape the technical direction of Chowdeck as we continue to scale our platform, products, infrastructure, and engineering teams.
You'll be responsible for driving architecture decisions, improving engineering standards, and building scalable systems that power critical parts of our business across customer ordering, logistics, vendor operations, fulfillment, and internal tooling. Our tech stack consists of NodeJS, MySQL, Redis, AWS, and other technologies.
We're looking for someone who is deeply technical, highly collaborative, and excited about solving complex operational and engineering challenges at scale while mentoring and supporting other engineers across the company.
In this role, you'll be required to:
Lead architecture and technical direction across multiple engineering teams and systems
Design and build scalable backend systems, services, and infrastructure
Drive improvements in reliability, performance, scalability, and engineering quality
Collaborate with Engineering, Product, Operations, and Leadership teams on long-term technical strategy
Lead complex technical initiatives across logistics, fulfillment, payments, and platform infrastructure
Improve engineering standards, tooling, observability, and development workflows
Mentor engineers across different levels and support technical growth across the organization
Identify long-term technical risks and proactively propose solutions
You're perfect for the role if you:
Have 10+ years of backend/software engineering experience
Have significant professional experience building and scaling large, highly available distributed systems
Have strong experience leading technical architecture and cross-functional engineering initiatives
Have deep knowledge of backend systems, databases, APIs, caching, cloud infrastructure, and system design
Can make thoughtful technical decisions that balance speed, scalability, reliability, and business impact
Can effectively communicate technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
Care deeply about engineering quality, developer experience, and operational excellence
Thrive in fast-paced startup environments with evolving challenges and priorities
Have a deep and unrelenting focus on customer satisfaction and experience
Beyond the paycheck, Chowdeck employees get:
Full medical coverage
Smart, kind colleagues invested in your growth
Housing Assistance
Transport Assistance
Lunch allowance
Chowdeck is an equal-opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any kind. We’re committed to providing employees with a work environment that is progressive and open-minded. Our employment philosophy is to hire the best people and empower them to do the best work of their lives. Employment decisions are based on business needs and individual merit without regard to race, color, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, nationality, marital status, gender, or age.

Employment type
Full-Time

Work arrangement
No