Lead Software Developer, Corporate Development Portal

Hugo builds and manages remote client support teams in African communities, providing rigorously screened and trained university-educated professionals to help companies achieve better outcomes. They offer highly engaged, top-tier talent, distinguishing themselves from traditional BPO services.

The Corporate Development Portal is a dynamic application with an active roadmap, integrating financial and operational dashboards with real-time data, KPI and OKR tracking, active projects, and supporting documentation for planning cycles. It also includes a knowledge base, document repositories with an AI layer, and role-based access to ensure users view relevant data. The lead engineer will transform the existing prototype into a production application within the Intelligence Hub, ensuring its continuous evolution. This involves defining the architecture and technical roadmap, designing data models, metric definitions, and reconciliation checks for consistent financial figures across all components. The role requires building frontend pages and components using React with Recharts, and backend routes in Node and Express to serve data from the data warehouse and Postgres to the UI. Additionally, the lead will manage data pipelines, design and build the AI layer for knowledge base agents and natural language querying, and implement robust authentication and role-based access in line with Hugo’s data security standards. They will also establish code review, testing, documentation, and release practices aligned with broader engineering standards, maintain the portal's availability and performance, and guide other engineers or contractors.

1. Lead the continuous evolution of the Corporate Development Portal, transforming the existing prototype into a production application within the Intelligence Hub.
2. Define the architecture and technical roadmap, clearly communicating options and tradeoffs to executive sponsors and department leaders.
3. Design data models, metric definitions, and reconciliation checks to ensure financial figures are consistent across dashboards, reports, and the AI layer.
4. Develop frontend pages and components using React, incorporating charts with Recharts.
5. Create backend routes using Node and Express to deliver data from the data warehouse and Postgres to the user interface.
6. Manage data pipelines that feed the Portal, ensuring dashboard figures accurately match their sources.
7. Design and implement the AI layer, including agents operating from the knowledge base and natural language querying capabilities for dashboards.
8. Develop and implement authentication and role-based access for various user groups, adhering to Hugo’s data security standards.
9. Establish and align code review, testing, documentation, and release practices with Hugo’s overall engineering standards.
10. Ensure the Portal's high availability and performance in production, creating runbooks for the wider team.
11. Mentor and review the work of any engineers or contractors assigned to the Portal as it expands.

1. Possess 8+ years of professional full-stack development experience, including architecting and leading at least one data-intensive product to production.
2. Demonstrate hands-on experience building analytics platforms and financial intelligence products (e.g., performance reporting, FP&A, planning, treasury, investor reporting, business intelligence) where numerical accuracy is paramount.
3. Have experience leading technical direction as a tech lead, staff engineer, or engineering lead, including mentoring other engineers.
4. Exhibit strong JavaScript proficiency across the stack, including React for frontend and Node.js with Express for backend development.
5. Possess strong SQL skills and extensive experience with PostgreSQL or a similar relational database.
6. Have experience building data-heavy dashboards and analytics applications.
7. Be proficient in modeling financial data, including defining metrics, handling periods, currencies, and reconciling with source systems.
8. Possess production experience with authentication and role-based access control, along with sound practices for protecting confidential data.
9. Have experience with BigQuery or another cloud data warehouse.
10. Be familiar with a BI tool such as Omni, Looker, Tableau, or Power BI.
11. Regularly use AI coding tools like Claude Code or Cursor.
12. Be proficient with Git and GitHub workflow, including leading code reviews.
13. Have a proven track record of collaborating directly with executives and business stakeholders, translating abstract requests into defined deliverables.
14. (Strong Advantage) Experience integrating LLMs or building AI agents in production, particularly for natural language querying over financial data.
15. (Strong Advantage) Experience within a finance, strategy, or corporate development team environment.
16. (Strong Advantage) Experience building multi-tenant or multi-entity systems where data separation is maintained.
17. (Strong Advantage) Cloud and deployment experience (AWS, Cloudflare, Nginx, CI/CD pipelines).
18. (Strong Advantage) Proficiency in Python or Node for scripting and data manipulation.