About the role
Join our growing FinTech Engineering team! We're recruiting a Backend Engineering Team Lead to spearhead the delivery of our new loan origination architecture, compliance systems, and pricing platform - infrastructure that will power M-KOPA's next phase of expansion across Africa. The Impact Your architecture will directly shape how millions of people access credit for the first time. We've already served over 7 million customers and unlocked more than $2 billion in credit since we began. Every system you design, every engineer you develop, and every decision you make contributes to a platform that's quite literally transforming financial inclusion across an entire continent 🌍 The Opportunity 🎯 Mission-driven engineering: Your daily work enables affordable smartphones, digital loans, and financial services for Africa's Every Day Earners - people for whom traditional finance simply doesn't work. 🏆 Global recognition: Join a FinTech company named by TIME 100 as one of the world's most influential and by the Financial Times as Africa's fastest-growing company for five consecutive years (2022–2026). 🚀 Scale that matters: You'll be architecting systems that process over 2 million payments daily across five markets - and building for the next 10 million customers. 🌱 Environmental impact: We're carbon-negative, having avoided 2.155 million tonnes of CO₂ emissions across our product portfolio.
What You'll Do At M-KOPA, you'll lead a team of backend engineers through both greenfield and legacy projects, owning the full software lifecycle from design ideation through to production and eventual decommissioning. Our engineering teams work under a true DevOps culture - with infrastructure as code, observability, automated testing, and continuous delivery treated as first-order concerns, not afterthoughts. You'll set architectural direction, partner closely with your Product Manager counterpart on roadmap planning and prioritisation, and serve as a servant leader who grows the people around you while shipping high-quality, impactful software. Technical Environment 💻 Languages & frameworks: C#/.NET Cloud: Azure Architecture: Event-driven systems and microservice development (Service Bus) Engineering culture: DevOps, infrastructure as code, observability and monitoring, automated testing across all environments including production, continuous delivery Our Engineering Approach 🚀 Full ownership: Teams own their solutions end-to-end - from inception through production support to decommissioning. Servant leadership: We lead by coaching and enabling, not directing. Quality by default: Observability, monitoring, and automated testing are built in from day one. Continuous improvement: We foster a culture of innovation within a supportive, dynamic team environment. Product partnership: Engineering and Product work as genuine counterparts - planning together, prioritising together, delivering together. What You Need We're looking for an experienced low-ego backend engineering leader who brings both technical depth and a genuine passion for growing people. Required Experience: Strong hands-on background in C#/.NET backend development Proven experience with Azure cloud services Solid understanding of event-driven architecture and microservice development (Service Bus, RabbitMQ, Kafka etc) Experience leading or mentoring engineers in a collaborative team environment Ability to set technical direction and provide architectural guidance Comfortable working with Product to shape roadmaps and drive delivery