Technical Lead

About Sun King

Sun King is the world’s leading off-grid solar energy company, delivering energy access to 1.8 billion people without reliable grid connections through innovative product design, fintech solutions, and field operations.

Key highlights:

• Connected over 20 million homes to solar power across Africa and Asia, adding 200,000 homes monthly.
• Affordable ‘pay-as-you-go’ financing model; after 1-2 years, customers own their solar equipment.
• Saved customers over $4 billion to date.
• Collect 650,000 daily payments via 28,000 field agents using mobile money systems.
• Products range from home lighting to high-energy appliances, with expansion into clean cooking, electric mobility, and entertainment.

With 2,800 staff across 12 countries, our team includes experts in various fields, all passionate about serving off-grid communities.

Diversity Commitment:

44% of our workforce are women, reflecting our commitment to gender diversity.

About the role:

The Backend Developer works remotely as part of the technology team to help Sun King’s EasyBuy business unit design and develop software to improve its field team operations.

What you will be expected to do

• Design and develop applications/systems based on wireframes and product requirements documents. 
• Design and develop logical and physical data models to meet application requirements. 
• Identify and resolve bottlenecks and bugs based on operational requirements.
• Perform unit tests on code to ensure robustness, including edge cases, usability, and general reliability. 
• Write reusable and easily maintainable code following the principles of DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself). 
• Integrate existing tools and business systems, both in-house and external services, such as ticketing software and communication tools. 
• Collaborate with team members and product managers to understand project requirements and contribute to the overall system design. 

You might be a strong candidate if you have/are

• Have development experience: 1-2 years backend development experience and have strong problem-solving abilities, proficiency in data structures, and algorithms. 
• Have a profound grasp of object-oriented programming (OOPS) standards and expertise in Core Java. 
• Have knowledge of SQL, MySQL, or similar database management. 
• Have Experience in integrating web services, such as SOAP, REST, JSON, and XML. 
• Have familiarity with RESTful APIs for linking Android applications to backend services. 
• Have preferred experience with version control systems like Git, but not mandatory. 
• Have additional knowledge of web technologies like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and frameworks like Spring or Hibernate would be advantageous. 

What we offer (in addition to compensation and statutory benefits):

• A platform for professional growth in a rapidly expanding, high-impact sector.
• Immerse in a collaborative culture, energized by employees of Sun King who are collectively motivated by fostering a transformative, sustainable venture.
• A genuinely global environment: Engage and learn alongside a diverse group from varied geographies and backgrounds.
• Tailored learning pathways through the Sun King Center for Leadership to elevate your leadership and managerial capabilities.

About the role:

You will own a functional area - from product conception to its delivery to customers. You are expected to design and code independently in multiple tech components related to your functional area. You must also develop a deep understanding of non-functional requirements, such as reliability and availability, scale, horizontal scalability, etc. over time to make tech stack decisions accordingly. You are expected to actively mentor junior engineers. You own

the codebase quality.

We are looking for seasoned engineers who are quality-conscious, product thinkers, business cognizant and smart. Engineers get to significantly amplify the impact of their work or creations with scale. The scale also demands that engineers to produce super-efficient solutions.

What you’ll do

• Strong experience with Java 8, Spring and Spring Boot, Spring MVC, Spring Data,
• Working experience in Microservices
• Version Control: Git
• Strong understanding of functional/reactive programming, OOP, design
• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes.
• SDLC: Working experience in Agile methodology
• Strong interpersonal skills and time management skills

What you’ll need

• B.Tech or M.Tech equivalent with at least 3 years of experience
• Deep expertise in at least one programming language & tech stack.
• Strong object-oriented design skills, ability to apply design patterns, and an uncanny ability to design intuitive module and class-level interfaces
• Experience in building data-driven web application design and development is a plus
• Good understanding of multiple tech solutions and ability to pick the correct one for the given situation
• Prior work experience in an agile environment or continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI or CD)
• Ability and experience in designing high-level software designs of the scalable system, taking NFR (non-functional requirement) into consideration

Product Responsibilities:

As an Engineering Manager, you will be responsible for the end-to-end delivery of one or more products and solutions.

10+ years of relevant industry experience.

Be technically strong and deliver product excellence.

Collaborate with your team and cross-functional partners to define and influence strategy.

Drive roadmap creation and execution.

Collaborate with various functions, drive engineering initiatives, and have an impact at an organizational level.

Participate in technical design. You will be the owner of the technical direction of the products.

Define clear OKRs and measure the impact of your team and individual members.

Evangelize your products across various teams and also to external customers.

Work with the GTM team to deliver success for the products.

Collaborate with the Recruitment/HR team to hire exceptional talent for your own team and also for other teams.

Minimum Qualifications:

Bachelor degree preferably in Computer Science from a reputed engineering college.

10+ years of proven experience, with 2+ years of leading a team.

Very strong in hands-on coding.

8+ years of combined experience in JVM languages(Java, Scala, Kotlin, etc), any scripting language like python, relational and non-relational databases.

Very strong in system design. You should have designed and implemented large-scale Web applications or data systems.

Strong verbal and written communication skills.

Demonstrated experience recruiting and managing technical teams, including performance management.

Good to have:

Don't worry, we'll ramp you up, but experience in any of these areas will help you hit the ground running:

Familiarity with technologies such as Apache Spark, Apache Hadoop ecosystem, and modern warehouses like Snowflake, AWS Redshift, etc.

Experience working with public cloud systems such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.

Experience with containerization and technologies such as Kubernetes and Docker.

 Knowledge of large-scale, data-heavy distributed systems.

• Work with product managers to understand product requirements and make them live.
• Ownership of end to end development

• Startup mindset of getting things done and focussing on business goals
• Proven problem solving skills
• 3+ years Hands on experience in designing and developing applications using server side technology (Java, Spring Boot / Node.js, Express)
• Excellent knowledge of Relational Databases, SQL and ORM technologies
• Good knowledge of design patterns
• Proficiency in REST architecture
• Experience with test-driven development
• Experience with Git/CI/CD/Gradle/Maven
• Inclination towards writing quality and performant code

• Experience in Agile development
• Performance tuning, testing, refactoring and automation
• Experience working with AWS Cloud and Devops technologies (terraform , cloudformation, ansible)
• Experience running a production environment
•  

Work as a member of a team responsible for developing a HIPAA compliant secure care coordination platform in accordance with established processes. You will apply your knowledge of building scalable, distributed applications and have the opportunity to work with new technologies & frameworks such as Spring Cloud Netflix, AWS, Azure, NoSQL DB.

Essential Functions include but are not limited to the following. 

You will be expected to:

• Contribute to all phases in the software lifecycle – requirements analysis, solution design, development, and deployment
• Maintain high quality standards for the work undertaken and be responsible for the quality of deliverables
• Ensure assigned projects are developed in accordance with established engineering processes, adhering to scope, schedule constraints and agile project plans
• Guide/mentor the less experienced team members
• Participate in code reviews
• Work effectively as part of a distributed team
• Document the features worked by him/her

Key technical expertise areas expected for this role:

Strong programming skills in Java 8(+) with clear understanding of Object-Oriented and Functional programming. 

• Experience on REST API Programming based on a Microservices Architecture
• Good Understanding of Databases (MySQL & Mongo) and proficiency in database schema designing & writing efficient SQL Queries 
• Strong troubleshooting skills
• Demonstrable ability to learn new programming languages and frameworks quickly
• Experience with distributed systems with specific focus on security and scalability
• Experience with modern cloud technologies such as AWS or Azure

Additional areas that would add value:

• Spring Cloud 
• Experience working with AES 256 based encryption algorithms
• Strong understanding of Design Patterns & their application in system design
• Using DevOps & Infrastructure tooling such as GoCD/Jenkins, Git
• Experience working on  projects, preferably in the healthcare domain
• Experience working with Virtualization and Containerization technologies including Docker, Kubernetes.
• Automated Unit/Integration testing
• Experience working with Linux and Shell scripting 
• Frontend web development with JavaScript frameworks like AngularJS
• Test Driven & Behavior Driven Development
• Experience working in Agile Scrum/Kanban methodologies

Education and Experience:

• Bachelors or Master’s in Computer Science or related fields.
• 5+ years of experience

Demonstrable experience in Core Java (8 or higher) and Spring framework (Core, AOP, Batch, JMS).

Multithreading, Data structure, Algorithm, Eceptional handling,OOPS Concepts, collections

• Excellent customer facing skills that include conducting compelling technical briefing & demonstrations. The person should have a technical aptitude to implement new technologies and articulate the solutions to the customer.
• Java, Spring with Database & Unix - Preferred with Scala or Spark(Hadoop) background
• Proven knowledge in OOPS & Data Structures
• Strong experience of developing multi-threaded and synchronization application
• Demonstrated delivery experience of Micro services APIs using Springboot, Oracle PL/SQL development and activities like Performance tuning / Optimization.
• Experience of using Git/Bitbucket, Maven/Bamboo, & related tools.
• Good Understanding of Agile Delivery Methodology & experience in working with Scrum teams.