The best time to audition for a job is when there is no advertised job.

-Ndubuisi Ekekwe

How to Get a Job in This Era

Ndubuisi Ekekwe had since resigned from Kobo360 board.

Africa’s leading digital logistics pioneer, Kobo360, has many job openings for accountants, developers and engineers. We are looking for brilliant people to join the KoboSquad as the mission of fixing logistics fiction in Africa expands. The call is simple: build and operate a Global Logistics Operating System (G-LOS). Kobo360, starting from Nigeria, has expanded into many markets in Africa. Backed by some of the most prestigious investors in the world including World Bank IFC, Kobo360 clients include Dangote Group, Olam, Flour Mill, Unilever, etc. We will be happy to have you in this business.

Kobo360 is a tech-enabled digital logistics platform that aggregates end-to-end haulage operations to help cargo owners, truck owners and drivers, and cargo recipients to achieve an efficient supply chain framework. Through an all-in-one robust logistics ecosystem, Kobo uses big data and technology to reduce logistics frictions, empowering rural farmers to earn more by reducing farm wastages and helping manufacturers of all sizes to find new markets. Kobo enables unprecedented efficiency and cost reduction in the supply chain, providing 360-visibility while delivering products of all sizes safely, on time and in full. The Kobo mission is to build the Global Logistics Operating System that will power trade and commerce across Africa and Emerging Markets.

Note: even though no degree is listed, we certainly appreciate you may have one. But in this business, what matters is what you can do. You will certainly like to be part of this. So, apply.

Accountant

Candidate Requirements: The candidate should:

• – be a chartered accountant with 4-5 years experience as a financial accountant;
• – be conversant with IFRS standards and their applications;
• – be able to process transactions and prepare financial statements in accordance with IFRS standards;
• – be conversant with Nigerian tax laws, be able to compute taxes and file tax returns;
• – have hands-on experience using accounting software such as sage, quickbooks, etc;
• -be proficient in the use of Microsoft Office packages, especially Excel.

Applications / submissions can be sent to careers@kobo360.com.

Job Description (Front end Engineer)

We are looking for a Front-End Web Developer who is motivated to combine the art of design with the art of programming. Responsibilities will include translation of the UI/UX design wireframes to actual code that will produce visual elements of the application. You will work with the UI/UX designer and bridge the gap between graphical design and technical implementation, taking an active role on both sides and defining how the application looks as well as how it works.

Responsibilities

• Develop new user-facing features
• Build reusable code and libraries for future use
• Ensure the technical feasibility of UI/UX designs
• Optimize application for maximum speed and scalability
• Assure that all user input is validated before submitting to back-end
• Collaborate with other team members and stakeholders

Skills And Qualifications

• Proficient understanding of web markup, including HTML5, CSS3
• Basic understanding of server-side CSS pre-processing platforms, such as LESS and SASS
• Proficient understanding of client-side scripting and JavaScript frameworks, including jQuery
• Good understanding of advanced JavaScript libraries and frameworks, such as AngularJS, KnockoutJS, BackboneJS, ReactJS, DurandalJS etc.
• Good understanding of asynchronous request handling, partial page updates, and AJAX
• Proficient understanding of cross-browser compatibility issues and ways to work around them.
• Proficient understanding of code versioning tools, such as {{Git / Mercurial / SVN}}
• Good understanding of SEO principles and ensuring that the application will adhere to them.

Applications / submissions can be sent to careers@kobo360.com.

Job Description (Back-End Engineer)

We are looking for a Back-End Web Developer responsible for managing the interchange of data between the server and the users. Your primary focus will be the development of all server-side logic, definition and maintenance of the central database, and ensuring high performance and responsiveness to requests from the front-end. You will also be responsible for integrating the front-end elements built by other developers into the application. A basic understanding of front-end technologies is therefore necessary as well.

Responsibilities

• Integration of user-facing elements developed by front-end developers with server-side logic
• Building reusable code and libraries for future use
• Optimization of the application for maximum speed and scalability
• Implementation of security and data protection
• Design and implementation of data storage solutions

Skills And Qualifications

• Basic understanding of front-end technologies and platforms, such as JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS3
• Good understanding of server-side CSS preprocessors, such as LESS and SASS
• Understanding accessibility and security compliance
• User authentication and authorization between multiple systems, servers, and environments
• Integration of multiple data sources and databases into one system
• Management of hosting environment, including database administration and scaling an application to support load changes
• Data migration, transformation, and scripting
• Setup and administration of backups
• Outputting data in different formats
• Understanding differences between multiple delivery platforms such as mobile vs desktop, and optimizing output to match the specific platform
• Creating database schemas that represent and support business processes
• Implementing automated testing platforms and unit tests
• Proficient knowledge of a back-end programming language one or more of PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, .NET, JavaScript etc.
• Proficient understanding of code versioning tools, such as Git
• Proficient understanding of OWASP security principles
• Understanding of “session management” in a distributed server environment

 Applications / submissions can be sent to careers@kobo360.com.

 Job Description (Quality Assurance Engineer)

When building software, you go through many stages. From initial requirements to product launch, it’s integral to ensure that everything works according to specification.

That’s why we’re looking for a quality assurance engineer to help us maintain our world-renowned level of quality and reliability.

By joining our team, you will take part in various projects, assessing software quality by designing and implementing software testing processes. You will take ownership of code quality through exploratory and automated tests. You will hunt bugs, identify issues, report them, and see that they’re dealt with.

There are no shortcuts in achieving greatness: It’s a lot of work. But once you’re at the top, you’ll enjoy the view.

Responsibilities

• Review and analyze requirements, specifications, and technical design documents, providing timely feedback
• Develop detailed, comprehensive, and well-structured test plans and test cases
• Prioritize and plan testing activities
• Design, develop and execute automated tests
• Identify and report issues found, then verify that issues are resolved
• Perform regression testing

Skills

• Proven work experience in software quality assurance
• Strong knowledge of software QA methodologies, tools, and processes
• Hands-on experience with automated testing tools such as selenium, appium, JMeter and load runner.
• A keen eye for detail and a commitment to excellence
• Be willing to help your teammates, share your knowledge with them, and learn from them
• Be open to receiving constructive feedback and turning it into process improvements

 Applications / submissions can be sent to careers@kobo360.com.

User Experience (UX) Designer

Job Description

We are looking for a user experience (UX) designer able to understand our business requirements and any technical limitations, as well as be responsible for conceiving and conducting user research, interviews and surveys, and translating them into sitemaps, user flows, customer journey maps, wireframes, mockups and prototypes. The UX designer will also be expected to design the overall functionality of the product, and in order to ensure a great user experience, iterate upon it in accordance with user-testing.

Responsibilities

• Translate concepts into user flows, wireframes, mockups and prototypes that lead to intuitive user experiences.
• Facilitate the client’s product vision by researching, conceiving, sketching, prototyping and user-testing experiences for digital products.
• Design and deliver wireframes, user stories, user journeys, and mockups optimized for a wide range of devices and interfaces.
• Identify design problems and devise elegant solutions.
• Make strategic design and user-experience decisions related to core, and new, functions and features.
• Take a user-centred design approach and rapidly test and iterate your designs.
• Collaborate with other team members and stakeholders.
• Ask smart questions, take risks and champion new ideas.

Requirements

• Three or more years of UX design experience. Preference will be given to candidates who have experience designing complex solutions for complete digital environments.
• Expertise in standard UX software such as Sketch, OmniGraffle, Axure, InVision, UXPin, Balsamiq, Framer, and the like is a must. Basic HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript skills are a plus.
• Ability to work with clients to understand detailed requirements and design complete user experiences that meet client needs and vision.
• Extensive experience in using UX design best practices to design solutions, and a deep understanding of mobile-first and responsive design.
• A solid grasp of user-centred design (UCD), planning and conducting user research, user testing, A/B testing, rapid prototyping, heuristic analysis, usability and accessibility concerns.
• Ability to iterate designs and solutions efficiently and intelligently.
• Ability to clearly and effectively communicate design processes, ideas, and solutions to teams and clients.
• A clear understanding of the importance of user-centred design and design thinking.
• Ability to work effectively in a team setting including synthesizing abstract ideas into concrete design implications.
• Be excited about collaborating and communicating closely with teams and other stakeholders via a distributed model, to regularly deliver design solutions for approval.
• Be passionate about resolving user pain points through great design.
• Be open to receiving feedback and constructive criticism.
• Be passionate about all things UX and other areas of design and innovation. Research and showcase knowledge in the industry’s latest trends and technologies.

 Applications / submissions can be sent to careers@kobo360.com.

 Job Description (Machine Learning Engineer)

We are looking for an expert in machine learning to help us extract value from our data. You will lead all the processes from data collection, cleaning, and preprocessing, to training models and deploying them to production.

The ideal candidate will be passionate about artificial intelligence and stay up-to-date with the latest developments in the field.

Responsibilities

• Understanding business objectives and developing models that help to achieve them, along with metrics to track their progress
• Managing available resources such as hardware, data, and personnel so that deadlines are met
• Analyzing the ML algorithms that could be used to solve a given problem and ranking them by their success probability
• Exploring and visualizing data to gain an understanding of it, then identifying differences in data distribution that could affect performance when deploying the model in the real world
• Verifying data quality, and/or ensuring it via data cleaning
• Supervising the data acquisition process if more data is needed
• Finding available datasets online that could be used for training
• Defining validation strategies
• Defining the preprocessing or feature engineering to be done on a given dataset
• Defining data augmentation pipelines
• Training models and tuning their hyperparameters
• Analyzing the errors of the model and designing strategies to overcome them
• Deploying models to production

Skills

• Proficiency with a deep learning framework such as TensorFlow or Keras
• Proficiency with Python and basic libraries for machine learning such as sci-kit-learn and pandas
• Expertise in visualizing and manipulating big datasets
• Proficiency with OpenCV
• Familiarity with Linux
• Ability to select hardware to run an ML model with the required latency

 Applications / submissions can be sent to careers@kobo360.com.

 Job Description (Data Engineer)

We are looking for a Data Engineer that will work on collecting, storing, processing, and analyzing huge sets of data. The primary focus will be on choosing optimal solutions to use for these purposes, then maintaining, implementing, and monitoring them. You will also be responsible for integrating them with the architecture used across the company.

Responsibilities

• Selecting and integrating any Data tools and frameworks required to provide requested capabilities
• Implementing the ETL process
• Monitoring performance and advising any necessary infrastructure changes
• Defining data retention policies

Skills and Qualifications

• Proficient understanding of distributed computing principles
• Management of Hadoop cluster, with all included services {{unless you are going to have specific Big Data DevOps roles for this}}
• Ability to solve any ongoing issues with operating the cluster {{unless you are going to have specific Big Data DevOps roles for this}}
• Proficiency with Hadoop v2, MapReduce, HDFS
• Experience with building stream-processing systems, using solutions such as Storm or Spark-Streaming {{if stream-processing is relevant for the role}}
• Good knowledge of Big Data querying tools, such as Pig, Hive, and Impala
• Experience with Spark {{if you are including or planning to include it}}
• Experience with integration of data from multiple data sources
• Experience with NoSQL databases, such as HBase, Cassandra, MongoDB
• Knowledge of various ETL techniques and frameworks, such as Flume
• Experience with various messaging systems, such as Kafka or RabbitMQ
• Experience with Big Data ML toolkits, such as Mahout, SparkML, or H2O {{if you are going to integrate Machine Learning in your Big Data infrastructure}}
• Good understanding of Lambda Architecture, along with its advantages and drawbacks
• Experience with Cloudera/MapR/Hortonwork

 Applications / submissions can be sent to careers@kobo360.com.

Job Description (Data Science Engineer)

We are looking for a data scientist that will help us discover the information hidden in vast amounts of data, and help us make smarter decisions to deliver even better products. Your primary focus will be in applying data mining techniques, doing statistical analysis, and building high-quality prediction systems integrated with our products.

Responsibilities

• Selecting features, building and optimizing classifiers using machine learning techniques
• Data mining using state-of-the-art methods
• Extending the company’s data with third-party sources of information when needed
• Enhancing data collection procedures to include information that is relevant for building analytic systems
• Processing, cleansing, and verifying the integrity of data used for analysis
• Doing the ad-hoc analysis and presenting results in a clear manner
• Creating automated anomaly detection systems and constant tracking of its performance

Skills and Qualifications

• Excellent understanding of machine learning techniques and algorithms, such as k-NN, Naive Bayes, SVM, Decision Forests, etc.
• Experience with common data science toolkits, such as R, Weka, NumPy, MatLab, etc. Excellence in at least one of these is highly desirable
• Great communication skills
• Experience with data visualisation tools, such as D3.js, GGplot, etc.
• Proficiency in using query languages such as SQL, Hive, Pig
• Experience with NoSQL databases, such as MongoDB, Cassandra, HBase
• Good applied statistics skills, such as distributions, statistical testing, regression, etc.
• Good scripting and programming skills
• Data-oriented personality

 Applications / submissions can be sent to careers@kobo360.com.

Google is offering a really good service in Nigeria: free Wifi in some strategically located areas. In most other nations on earth, governments do just that. I expect it to extend the service to major schools and airports in the near future; it is already in MMA2 airport Lagos.

Certainly, while we can all read meanings into the double play strategy where it gives free Wifi to expand its domains, across board, it is a very positive initiative. Largely, there is no element of fairness or objectivity to call the Google initiative “illegal” as reported by the Nation. My understanding is that Google pays ISPs who are already licensed to provide internet services in Nigeria, and then makes the services free to the citizens. Unless there is a law in Nigeria that says nothing can be given free, at scale, NCC (Nigerian Communications Commission), the industry regulator, has no case.

Investigations by the Nation revealed that the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), the regulatory body for telecommunications in the country, has reported global internet giant, Google, to the Federal Government for evading regulatory oversight in its bid to expand its ‘free’ Wi-Fi deployment in Nigeria.

Google is currently rolling out the ‘free’ Wi-Fi service in Lagos and Abuja with plans to expand to other locations in the country, a development that has caused great concerns in the industry because of the threat to the investment made by existing telecoms operators and privacy issues occasioned by the internet giant’s mode of operation.

A letter from NCC to the Presidential Enabling Business Environment Council (PEBEC) under the Office of the Vice President, sighted by our correspondent, indicated that Google may be illegally providing its ‘free’ Wi-Fi in the country under obscure conditions that put it beyond regulatory purview.

The letter, signed on behalf of NCC’s Executive Vice Chairman by the Executive Commissioner (Stakeholder Management), Mr. Sunday Dare, reported to the Office of the Vice President (PEBEC) that “Google is operating in Nigeria without being licensed by the Commission with the implications that it does not pay applicable fees, levies and taxes that are paid by other players in the telecommunications sector.”

Sure, this is a new territory but it changes nothing: people give out bags of rice, beans, water, etc. They indeed bought those things and then freely gave them out to expand their missions. It is irrelevant whether it is free access to Internet or free amala! The real question is what happens after the giving – and that is where regulation would be needed.

We all understand the fear around Google Station, the free Wifi service: if Google makes the web free, no one will buy mobile credits from the telcos thereby reducing government revenue. But we need to understand that Google is buying the web services from licensed ISPs in Nigeria. Certainly, it may not be balanced to restrict such services.

Certainly, I do expect NCC to make sure that Google does not prioritize its apps or services over others on these free Wifi services in ways that restrict fair competition. So, Google cannot restrict access to competitor’s websites or solutions while allowing a similar one it provides. That is where regulation matters but not attacking a company that buys services from Nigerian companies and then make those services free!

What Google is doing is what American companies do to improve market caps. Yes, spend say $10 million to give free Wifi in Africa, record great user growth and Wall Street adds $1 billion in your market cap, arising out of the momentum. Retail shops do massive discounts in America to meet sales targets, losing money on the way, but seeing market valuation move north. Simply, it could make sense to “lose” $15 million in a quarter on discounts in order to add $500 million in your market cap because of same-store merchandize volume growth, stimulated by the discount.

Nothing is indeed free but on this free Wifi service, there is no harm to the Nigerian people. Google should not be harassed out of existence.

LinkedIn Comment on Feed

The only thing I see here is an array of confusion, from NCC to the reporter reporting the whole stuff. The PEBEC under the office of the VP was “excited” about the Google’s initiative, they even went to California sometime ago…

NCC wants Google to perhaps pay for license and probably taxes for offering free WiFi services. NCC will have a case only if Google’s free WiFi is purely satellite based, without having anything to do with any licensed telecom firm in Nigeria. So in the spirit of trying to protect the investments of licensed operators, NCC can stop Google from doling out free stuff; else it’s another round of confusion.

Mentioning ‘privacy’ concerns is a weak argument, Google can always collect and harvest data from people, NCC’s licensing doesn’t control how Google collects data, Android alone is a rich source for data collection…

Google is trying to do what the government has been preaching for ages, and now NCC is confused. The NCC that got budgetary provision to support SIM card registration, and still gets budgetary provision to support broadband expansion?

Well, to resolve the squabbles, send money to telcos, as a way to cushion their investment losses, then encourage Google to expand its free stuff!

Google Nigeria Promises Free Wifi, What Do We Search Or Do With It?