Tech Support Officer - SIFA

About Educate!

Educate! works to expand opportunities for Africa’s young people by designing practical, scalable solutions that help youth learn, earn, and build sustainable livelihoods. The organization focuses on youth employment and skills development, including introducing an employment-focused subject in secondary schools and running livelihood boot camps for out-of-school youth, especially marginalized rural girls and young women. Its programs have reached more than 500,000 young people across Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, and Tanzania, and it is recognized as a leading youth employment and skills provider in East Africa.

The organization is made up of more than 300 staff members, largely African, along with around 300 volunteer youth mentors. It is backed by a range of major foundations and funders, has received international awards and recognition, and continues to pursue a long-term vision of creating measurable impact for millions of youth across Africa every year.

Role Overview

Educate! is seeking a proactive, detail-focused Tech Support Officer to act as the first point of contact for issues across its digital products. These include a WhatsApp coaching bot, web-based chat applications, SMS flows, and USSD entry points. The role is responsible for receiving user-reported issues, sorting them correctly, coordinating with the right teams, and ensuring they are followed through to full resolution.

You will keep youth participants and frontline staff informed while issues are being handled, helping preserve trust in the organization’s digital tools. This position suits someone who enjoys troubleshooting, works well in a fast-moving environment, and likes supporting technology teams by handling operational support effectively.

Key Responsibilities

In this role, you will support users across several digital channels, manage issue resolution, maintain clear records, and help strengthen the support process as the product evolves.

• Provide first-level support for the WhatsApp coaching bot, chat web applications, SMS journeys, and USSD access points once they are live.
• Handle incidents and change requests according to agreed service timelines, while keeping users informed about progress and outcomes.
• Assess issues reported by youth directly in the product or through Business Advisors, then either resolve them or escalate them to engineering with enough detail to avoid repeat investigation.
• Help youth and Business Advisors with product usage, feature guidance, and recovery from common problems such as login issues, missing chat history, or missed nudges.
• Follow up with youth and frontline teams after escalation to ensure the issue is truly fixed end to end.
• Maintain user satisfaction through clear, timely, and consistent communication.
• Reduce operational disruption by resolving issues efficiently and in a structured way.
• Follow operational standards designed to prevent losses caused by silent failures, missed nudges, and undelivered messages.
• Work with the Product Owner and engineering team to keep the support process updated as the product changes.
• Support Operations with vendor coordination, including tracking invoice accuracy and timely invoice uploads for technology vendors.
• Train and onboard new tech team members on support workflows, ticketing standards, and the incident response runbook.
• Take on additional tasks as assigned by the line manager.
• Record every issue, interaction, and resolution in Jira using the approved templates.
• Share relevant logs, screenshots, and reproduction steps with engineers to support technical investigation.
• Carry out regular health checks on digital channels, including WhatsApp delivery, SMS routing, web app sign-in, and USSD journeys, to spot operational issues early.
• Flag repeated problems so the engineering team can address the root cause.
• Identify support risks such as blind spots, single points of failure, compliance drift, and recurring weaknesses, then escalate them appropriately.
• Build and keep current a support knowledge base, including runbooks for common issues and FAQs for Business Advisors and youth-facing teams.

Requirements

• A degree in a business-related field or a closely related discipline.
• At least 1 to 2 years of experience in technical support.
• Practical exposure to ticketing tools such as Jira, Linear, Zendesk, or similar systems.
• Experience supporting digital products with large user bases is an advantage.
• Comfort using support ticket systems and basic data tools.
• Strong ability to manage time and prioritize urgent, competing tasks.
• Ability to stay calm and effective when pressure is high.
• Empathy and patience when supporting first-time digital users, especially youth.
• Strong written and spoken communication skills for daily ticket updates and user responses.
• Good troubleshooting and problem-solving capability.
• Strong discipline in ticket handling and follow-up.
• Agility and willingness to own operational support work thoroughly.
• Alignment with Educate!’s five culture tenets.

Terms and Conditions

The preferred duty station is the organization’s office in Nairobi, Kenya. Compensation will be competitive within the social enterprise sector and aligned to experience. The package includes health insurance and a generous vacation policy. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis, and interviews are expected to begin soon.

Culture and Safety

Educate! values a mission-driven, ambitious, and inclusive environment. Team members are expected to go beyond their job description, keep learning, work collaboratively, and maintain a startup mindset that welcomes change and continuous improvement. The organization also emphasizes youth safety and inclusion. All candidates will be screened for child and youth safety, and a Certificate of Good Conduct will be required. Employment offers may be withdrawn if any youth-safety risk is identified.