VP Engineering : Beem

Title: Vice President of Engineering

Location: East Africa

Reports To: Chief Technical Officer, Chief Executive Officer

Role of Dekaya
At Dekaya, we are a CTO consultancy firm that acts as an intermediary managing the full hiring process on behalf of our client. Our client is a 10+ year old technology-driven organization in the communication space, building a global communications platform.

Overview

The Vice President of Engineering will own the end-to-end engineering strategy, execution, and team leadership for a high-scale communications platform company delivering APIs and infrastructure. The role demands a leader capable of driving product velocity, platform reliability, and developer experience across global-scale, cloud-native systems.

Key Responsibilities

1. Technology Strategy and Architecture

• Support and execute the company’s technical vision, ensuring scalability, resilience, and innovation in core communications APIs (SMS, voice, ussd,chat, email).

• Architect systems for global reliability, low latency, and multi-cloud deployment.

• Ensure interoperability and extensibility across all API products.

• Oversee security, compliance, and privacy architectures meeting telecom and enterprise standards (SOC2, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA where applicable).

2. Engineering Leadership and Execution

• Lead distributed engineering teams spanning platform, infrastructure, DevOps, data, and SDKs.

• Establish measurable engineering KPIs covering velocity, uptime, incident response, and delivery quality.

• Drive continuous delivery (CI/CD), automation, and modern DevOps practices.

• Maintain a high performance engineering culture, balancing velocity and reliability.

3. Product and Platform Development

• Partner with Product and Design to prioritize high-impact platform capabilities and API enhancements.

• Translate customer and developer needs into technical roadmaps.

• Ensure robust SDKs, documentation, and developer tooling to drive API adoption.

• Oversee internal platform services (auth, billing, messaging routing, telemetry, etc.).

4. People and Organization Development

• Recruit, scale, and mentor senior engineering leaders and technical talent.

• Define organizational structure supporting growth and innovation.

• Foster a culture of ownership, transparency, and technical excellence.

5. Cross-functional Collaboration and Executive Partnership

• Collaborate with the executive team, Product, Security, and GTM teams to align technology direction with market demand.

• Communicate engineering progress, risks, and tradeoffs to the executive team and board.

• Represent engineering in strategic partnerships and enterprise customer engagements.

Qualifications

1. Professional Experience

• 10+ years of engineering experience, 2+ in executive or senior leadership roles within high-scale SaaS, communications, or API-first companies.

• Proven record of building and operating distributed systems at scale.

• Deep expertise in: cloud infrastructure (AWS), real-time communication systems, API platform design, and developer ecosystems.

1. Skills and Abilities

• Demonstrated ability to drive innovation and develop cost-effective technology solutions that address complex business needs.

• Exceptional communication skills, with a proven ability to lead and organize high-performing teams.

• Capability to influence and inspire cross-functional teams to achieve outstanding results.

• Extensive technical expertise in diverse technologies, platforms, and architectures.

• Strategic thinking capabilities with a knack for translating complex business requirements into scalable technological solutions.

• Proficiency in managing budgets and formulating strategic business plans.

• Agile and adaptable, with a capacity to respond calmly and swiftly to changes in a fast-paced environment and under high-pressure situations.

• Strong project management skills, including resource allocation and effective problem-solving.

• Knowledge of agile methodologies, DevOps practices, and contemporary software development processes.

• A robust understanding of cybersecurity principles, risk management, and regulatory compliance frameworks.

• Strong knowledge of reliability engineering, observability, and modern DevOps automation.

• Track record of recruiting and developing high-performing engineering organizations.

• Exceptional technical judgment and strategic thinking ability.

• Experience working at a high-growth startup is a plus.

• Prior experience working on high-scale communications platforms.

• Background in telecommunications or real-time event-driven systems.

1. Education

• A Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field is required.

• A Master's degree or any other relevant postgraduate qualification is highly advantageous.
  

Compensation

Executive-level package including base salary and annual bonus, aligned with growth-stage technology leadership benchmarks.