Founded in 2014, Tastemakers Africa is a trusted community marketplace for black millennials looking to connect to culture and heritage worldwide. Our roots are in disrupting the narrative on travel in Africa through authentic experiences with locals in African cities. We now have our sights on taking this model throughout the continent and across the African diaspora in an effort to build community, connections, and understanding among people of African descent.

Experiences on Tastemakers Africa are tours, events, and activities that gives guests "insider level" access to culture and community wherever they travel. Each curator is selected based on their connection to the community, their passion for sharing their city, and the interesting and unique way they can create something epic for visitors.

In a short time Tastemakers Africa has become one of the most influential brands in Africa and within the diaspora community worldwide. That influence is set to reach epic proportions with the launch of new cities and an expanded product line. Our ambition is to shape the future of travel and make, shape, and lead significant cultural impact and in turn, establish Tastemakers as a voice and authority in culture-forward, authentic travel that goes beyond surface.

In order to realize this opportunity, Tastemakers Africa is looking for a software engineer to take our product to the next level. Our aim in the next 12 months is to put the “sauce” in our platform combining community and experiences that’ll change the way we travel. You’ll iterate on the Tastemakers platform, architect new applications and microservices, and own our technology stack. Our software engineers are just as comfortable behind a screen as they are meeting new people. We see travel as a way to make the world better and we couldn't be more excited to be the engineers behind the movement making it happen.

Our day-to-day switches between ideation, architecture, and implementation and our month-to-month switches between different, full-stack projects: including the Tastemakers API, our in-house CMS, web app, mobile app, and more.

Responsibilities

Tastemakers software engineers are expected to be multidisciplinary with an MVP-mindset. Projects change every few weeks or months, but our approach does not. Our collaborative programming process is test-driven, intentional, and creative. We work on web and mobile projects across entire stacks: including managed server hosting, routing, API development, backend development, and frontend development. You’ll be responsible for:

• Working within a small, multidisciplinary product team.
• Designing and engineering new code, systems, platforms, and processes.
• Continuously improving microservices, codebases, and testing suites.
• From time to time, taking ownership of entirely new projects.
• Caring deeply about elegant and scalable code.

Requirements

• 3+ years of software development or software engineering experience
• 1+ years of front-end web development experience (including modern standards for HTML and SCSS)
• 1+ years of managed server hosting experience (ideally AWS or DigitalOcean)
• Skilled in full-stack JavaScript development (our stack is JavaScript, Node.js, React, Express, and Redux)
• Experience with the architecture, deployment, and maintenance of complex web or mobile applications
• Experience with Test-Driven Development
• Traveler-centric prioritization and team-centric collaboration

Nice-to-Have

• Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Data Science, Math, or a similar field
• Experience with platform-agnostic mobile development (we work in React Native)
• Experience with platform-specific mobile development (we prefer Swift and Kotlin)
• Experience with pair programming in a professional setting
• Experience working with travel and/or startup environments
• 1+ years of UX/UI design experience
• Experience building products for diverse audiences
• Open source project contributions

We Offer

• Work on a suite of modern products that will change the travel industry for the better
• Small-team collaboration, mentorship, and pair programming
• One fully-covered large software conference, retreat, or workshop series per year
• An annual team conference in Africa
• Ongoing internal team workshops and local conference access
• Monthly happy hours with our HQ team in New York City
• Health Insurance
• Monthly MTA benefits
• Tastemakers experience credits, to be used by you or gifted away
• 0% - 1% Equity (depending on applicant experience)