We are looking for a Principal Architect to join our Engineering team in Johannesburg. 

The world is changing. We all want something different.

At Luno, we see you as an individual, and we want to unleash your potential and empower you to become the best possible version of yourself.

Luno welcomes crypto lovers and crypto newbies. You - just like everyone in the world - are on your own unique crypto-learning journey.

We are a mission-driven cryptocurrency company that is building more open and equal access to the future of money. You don’t have to know lots about crypto to be interested in joining us, you just have to feel that upgrading the world to a fairer financial system matters, and that you’d like to be part of this global change. We’re a passionate and committed team taking on a challenge of epic proportions. Like the first moon landing, it requires a special kind of people working together with unusual skill, focus and determination. We need the best team on board for our mission. 

If that sounds like a culture you’d thrive in, then we are excited to hear from you.

A little about us

• Luno means moon in Esperanto, we chose the name because at night, wherever you are in the world, you look up at the same moon. We believe in the power of working together, as one team, across borders, with clear focus and shared purpose.
• Our popular mobile app and website helps people around the world grow and manage their money using the world's most mature cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin, Ethereum and USDC. We’ve processed over $21 billion to date.
• Over 7 million customers across 40 countries have chosen to hold their crypto wallets on Luno because we offer a delightfully simple experience and bank-grade security. 
• We're part of the Digital Currency Group, named in 2021 as one of TIME magazine’s 100 Most Influential Companies, in the “Disruptors” category alongside Tesla, AirBnB, SpaceX, Peloton. TIME noted that DCG is “mainstreaming cryptocurrency”.
• We’re proud to be one of the world’s most international cryptocurrency teams, with colleagues from 43 different nationalities working across South Africa, Indonesia, the United Kingdom, Malaysia, Nigeria, Australia and Singapore. Financial inclusion is part of our mission, but on a deeper level, inclusion is a way of life, and a way of work for us. It is part of who we are as a company, and a group of human individuals.

How we work

Our engineering team (currently ~100 engineers) is split into organisations which we call Fleets. Each Fleet focuses on a core customer journey (onboarding, security, payments, support, new business, growth and marketing etc.). Each of these fleets contains multiple smaller teams called Pods, each of which focuses on a specific aspect of the product. 

Pods will include a product owner, product designer, back-end engineers, Android, iOS and Web developers, who each bring a unique perspective to the problem you are all contributing towards. 

We're agile, use scrum, continuous integration and continuous delivery, deploying to production every single day.

We're building teams to help us succeed in our mission to upgrade the world to a better financial system. You’ll be joining a group of highly motivated software engineers who you’ll work collaboratively with across our pods.

As a fast-growing company with offices around the world, you’ll immediately see how your contributions directly impact both our internal users and client experience. Many of the problems we are solving result in trail blazing solutions which can’t be found on Stack Overflow; so we’re looking for engineers who flourish working in a complex domain.

 

In your first six months, you will:

...begin your journey at Luno by learning our processes, meeting the wider team, and starting our onboarding program. You’ll join the Engineering Leadership team meetings and start to understand our objectives and OKRs, and the challenges that we have to rise to in order to deliver against them.

 

Your mission will involve:

We’re entering our next phase of growth on our mission to bring crypto to the global mass consumer market. That means we know that we have big, complex (and exciting!) architectural challenges ahead of us, so we need you to take a seat on the Engineering Leadership Team and partner with Engineering Directors, Staff Engineers, and wider to help us navigate the best possible path for our customers and our business. Your path will involve;

 

• Leading thinking on how our systems and software architecture evolves
• Understanding and articulating what we need to do to provide unbeatable reliability and performance for our customers
• Carefully planning how we implement changes in our stack without negatively impacting our customers
• Designing and establishing processes and support mechanisms for our teams, to provide architecture & design governance and oversight, while complementing our agile ways of working
• Challenging our Engineering teams and leaders to consider different approaches, technologies, or paradigms where they will give us a competitive advantage
• Championing and designing for compliance, security, and data protection
• Being a lead contributor to our long term Engineering Strategy.

 

We’re looking for someone that is in touch with the technology, that likely can still write code occasionally, that knows the difference between Kafka, Kubernetes, Kotlin, and Queuing, and can find their way around large distributed microservice platforms (preferably written in golang),  ensuring 100ms P99 latencies, event driven architecture, big data analytics (billion+ new rows per day), and large online application data tables (more than billion rows). If that sounds like you, and you have architected systems at consumer-facing internet-scale before, we want to speak to you.

 

The ideal candidate for this role will have:

• Experience in leading the architecture of consumer-facing, highly scalable software systems built by teams of over 100 heads
• Experience writing code, designing, and delivering software systems
• Understanding of at least one cloud platform, ideally AWS
• Specific architectural knowledge of Golang, iOS, Android, and related technologies would be awesome
• A capacity to both act as a servant leader and to lead from the front
• Experience with the OKR framework
• Proven experience in hiring and growing technical staff and managers, including performance management
• BSc/MSc/PhD in computer science or other technical discipline, or equivalent working experience
• A passion for software development, mobile technology and Bitcoin
• To be friendly, transparent, articulate and driven to succeed
• A work permit for South Africa if you are not a South African citizen

Don’t be put off if you don’t tick all of the boxes – they’re a guide based on what we’d love to see but we appreciate that excellent software engineers have diverse backgrounds.

 

Remote Life at Luno

If you’re looking to work on something truly global and disruptive with a forward-thinking and ambitious team that highly values diversity, teamwork, and the continuous quest for excellence, then this is an opportunity for you.

Like the majority of the companies, Luno is currently working remotely to keep our employees safe, which means you will not be physically, but virtually onboarded for now!

• Live long and prosper. We’ve got you covered with excellent private medical insurance. 
• You'll be able to continuously up-skill yourself with access to free courses on Udemy, Coursera and Codecademy.
• For the crypto fans among you (should be everyone!), you'll pay 0 fees with Luno from the day you start
• Generous maternity / paternity and even (yes, you are reading it correctly) paw-ternity for your furry friend.
• Apple all the way. New Macbook, mouse and keyboard.
• Annual Inspiration Day... for that pottery course you’ve always been meaning to do!
• Work with a diverse team of hardworking, ambitious and friendly people on something that will truly revolutionise the financial world.
• We have virtual cooking, dancing, drawing and house planting classes hosted by our Lunauts to break up your day and work that other part of your brain.
• Work is important, but your mental health should always take priority. At Luno, we do everything we can to make sure you lead a healthy and happy life. That's why Luno gives you free access to Headspace – a full library of guided meditations, sleep stories, and music.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. You'll need to hold the legal right to work in South Africa already as we cannot provide visa sponsorship. 

Be part of the change! 🚀