Agence Togo Digital

Department: Digital Factory

Location: Agence Togo Digital, Lomé, Togo

Reporting Manager: Head of Digital Factory

Functional Supervision: Tech Lead

Functional Collaborations: Product teams, business analysts, frontend and backend developers, DevOps, QA, infrastructure, security teams, and the Technical Direction

Positions available: 1

Main Mission

Within the framework of developing digital products and services led by Agence Togo Digital, the Rust Developer / Rust Backend Engineer will be responsible for designing, developing, testing, documenting, and maintaining high-performance, secure, reliable, and scalable software solutions.

He/she will ensure code quality, transactional security, application performance, and adherence to functional and technical requirements defined by the Agency.

Working under the functional supervision of a Tech Lead and in close collaboration with cross-functional product, development, DevOps, QA, infrastructure, and security teams, the Rust Developer will actively contribute to technical architecture discussions, introduce development best practices, and drive continuous optimization of the engineered solutions.

In the execution of their duties, the Rust Developer is expected to deliver or update the following key outputs, depending on the specific typology of the projects under their purview:

Documented, maintainable source code matching ATD's strict quality benchmarks;
High-performance backend services and application modules built in Rust;
Highly secure, low-latency APIs (REST, gRPC, or equivalent protocols);
Comprehensive technical specifications for engineered modules;
Technical API documentation detailing endpoints, authentication paradigms, payload formats, error contracts, and usage policies;
Robust unit tests, integration test suites, and technical validation scripts;
Performance profiling and analysis reports for critical runtime components when required;
Hotfixes, patches, and version updates resolving identified anomalies;
Operations and systemic documentation designed to streamline downstream maintenance;
Code review contributions, technical pattern definitions, and backend development best practices.

The Rust Developer plays a pivotal role in enforcing the technical quality, structural reliability, and throughput performance of solutions shipped by ATD. He/she may also be requested to assist in the initial design, architectural review, user acceptance testing (UAT), and fine-tuning of the Agency’s broader digital platforms.

Responsibilities

1. Backend Design and Development in Rust

Design and develop core applications, backend services, high-throughput APIs, and mission-critical modules using Rust.
Participate in the technical analysis of requirements mapped out by product teams, business analysts, and project managers.
Translate functional and technical requirements into robust, secure, and easily maintainable software solutions.
Build highly reliable, asynchronous, or low-overhead backend components tailored to demanding production workloads.
Guide technical design choices and help define application microservices/monolithic architectures.

2. API Engineering and Systems Integration

Architect, implement, and maintain secure, self-documenting APIs optimized for latency and throughput.
Manage the integration of backend services with frontend interfaces, third-party platforms, data persistence layers, and external legacy systems.
Ensure strict adherence to API contracts, serialization/deserialization formats, secure authentication mechanics, and perimeter defenses.
Partner with frontend developers, peer backend engineers, and DevOps specialists to guarantee frictionless end-to-end integration.
Safeguard the stability, backward compatibility, and elasticity of endpoints exposed to citizens, civil servants, and institutional partners.

3. Code Performance, Security, and Reliability

Profile and optimize the performance metrics of applications, background daemons, and specific library modules.
Enforce deterministic memory management, sound concurrency primitives, and minimal system resource consumption.
Embed modern application security (AppSec) best practices directly into backend transactions, input fields, and API layouts.
Audit, identify, isolate, and remediate technical vulnerabilities, memory safety bypasses, data races, or logical anomalies.
Architect fault-tolerant failovers for critical components across government-scale applications.

4. Software Quality, Testing, and Maintenance

Author comprehensive unit, integration, and non-regression suites to validate systemic behavior.
Participate in peer code reviews to maintain code consistency and spread architectural idioms.
Triage and remediate code bugs reported by QA specialists, product managers, operations teams, or users.
Drive corrective, evolutionary, and adaptive codebase maintenance over time.
Ensure compliance with software engineering metrics regarding readability, doc-comments, linting rules (clippy), and formatting (rustfmt).

5. Technical Documentation and Knowledge Transfer

Draft and keep up to date the inner-architecture documentation of all authored services and modules.
Explicitly record architectural choices, execution graphs, dependencies, configurations, and deployment prerequisites.
Contribute to cultivating the organizational knowledge base within the Digital Factory.
Format code layouts and documentation to facilitate ownership, onboarding, and refactoring tasks by other team members.
Share insights, optimization strategies, and idioms unique to the Rust compiler and backend paradigms.

6. Cross-Functional Collaboration and Agile Workflows

Interlock with business analysts and product owners to comprehend core citizen-facing needs and engineer appropriate software workflows.
Collaborate with DevOps engineers to streamline automated build targets, container image definitions, testing pipelines, and environment metrics monitoring.
Team up with infrastructure and security departments to ensure deployment reliability, system availability, and cryptographic compliance.
Actively engage in Agile ceremonies, technical grooming workshops, scoping sessions, and project syncs.
Act as an explicit bridge, translating intricate technical patterns into clear, functional statuses for business teams.

7. Technology Watch and Continuous Improvement

Maintain an active watch over the evolving Rust ecosystem (language updates, backend frameworks like Actix-web/Axum, performance profiles, and crates security advisories).
Recommend technical modernizations aimed at reducing code technical debt, boosting performance, or strengthening security postures.
Help advance ATD's internal backend development engineering playbooks.
Evaluate and experiment with emerging toolsets, libraries, or methods capable of elevating engineering velocity and deliverable quality.

Required Skills

Rust Ecosystem Mastery: Expert-level command of the Rust language, including ownership semantics, lifetime bounds, thread safety, asynchronous programming (tokio), macro systems, and package/build management with Cargo.
Modern Backend Engineering: Advanced understanding of system architectures, distributed computing, microservices design patterns, and high-concurrency systems.
API Technologies: Advanced knowledge of RESTful API design, gRPC over HTTP/2, protocol buffers, and cloud-native interface contracts.
Systems Programming Concepts: Practical knowledge of thread modeling, execution concurrency, optimal memory management, zero-cost abstractions, and profiling bottlenecks.
Data Persistence: Sound understanding of relational and non-relational database management systems (e.g., PostgreSQL, MongoDB) along with optimal query structuring or asynchronous drivers.
CI/CD & Version Control: Advanced proficiency in Git, structured branching, and a strong awareness of container runtimes (Docker) and automated workflows.
Quality & Validation: Strong practices in writing test assertions, integration matrices, mock layers, and conducting rigorous diagnostic debugging.
AppSec Literacy: Good grasp of application security protocols, token management (OAuth2, JWT), encryption basics, and data-at-rest/in-transit protection rules.
Soft Skills: Sharp analytical focus, attention to edge cases, high autonomy, and the ability to articulate technical problems to non-technical stakeholders. Excellent teamwork habits in multi-disciplinary Agile squads.

Qualifications

Education: Minimum of a Bachelor’s degree (Licence / BAC+3) in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical engineering domain.
Professional Experience: A minimum of 3 years of experience in software development, with a significant, proven track record delivering production-grade services in Rust.
Proven Track Record: Tangible experience shipping API systems, enterprise backends, or critical middleware services.
Valued Profiles: Experience building high-availability, secure, and scalable digital architectures is a major plus. Backgrounds in pure product engineering, open-source library contributions, or advanced Rust crate publishing will be heavily weighted.

Job Requirements and Challenges

High engineering standards regarding memory footprint optimization, zero-downtime architecture designs, and self-documenting code.
Ownership and technical accountability over critical application modules powering country-scale citizen portals and public administration networks.
Operating in an embedded matrix structure alongside product owners, frontend developers, DevOps engineers, QA analysts, and infrastructure architects.
Managing delivery timelines while ensuring that performance profiles are not compromised under operational scheduling constraints.
Absolute commitment to authoring clean, comprehensive, and up-to-date documentation.
Uncompromising adherence to national digital security guidelines, confidentiality boundaries, and user privacy protection laws.
Ability to troubleshoot live production anomalies swiftly and contribute actively to systemic stability.
Mandatory requirement to stay fully updated on language safety advisories, core crate upgrades, and modern backend optimization vectors.

Rust Developer