Our client is a high-growth fintech building the payment infrastructure powering Africa's digital economy. The business enables merchants and enterprises to seamlessly accept, convert, hedge, and settle digital assets through a secure, compliant, and scalable payments platform. Their technology supports online and in-store transactions through APIs, e-commerce integrations, Android-based payment terminals, and sophisticated backend infrastructure designed to facilitate instant value transfer across borders. Having secured significant international investment and already processing millions of dollars in transaction volume, the company is rapidly expanding across Africa and is positioned at the forefront of digital payments innovation.

Job Description:

Our client is looking for a highly capable Senior Software Engineer to play a critical role in designing, building, and scaling the next generation of their payments platform.

Your daily adventures include:

• Design, build, and maintain scalable backend services using Java and Spring Boot.
  
• Develop and support payment processing, merchant integration, settlement, reconciliation, and ledger services.
  
• Build APIs and platform services that support merchant onboarding, transaction processing, treasury functions, and operational tooling.
  
• Own projects throughout the full software development lifecycle from concept through deployment and ongoing optimisation.
  
• Write clean, maintainable, well-tested code that meets performance, reliability, and security requirements.
  
• Drive technical design discussions and produce architecture documentation for new initiatives.
  

Architecture & Technical Leadership

• Lead technical design decisions and evaluate trade-offs between scalability, reliability, complexity, and delivery timelines.
  
• Contribute to platform architecture and long-term engineering strategy.
  
• Continuously improve service design, system integrations, data models, and platform scalability.
  
• Establish and maintain engineering best practices, coding standards, and review processes.
  
• Provide technical guidance on complex engineering challenges.
  

Production Ownership & Reliability

• Take ownership of production systems, ensuring reliability, availability, and performance.
  
• Monitor, troubleshoot, and optimise services operating in production environments.
  
• Participate in incident response, root cause analysis, and preventative improvement initiatives.
  
• Implement observability, monitoring, and alerting best practices.
  
• Champion security, risk management, and compliance requirements appropriate for a regulated fintech environment.
  

Mentorship & Collaboration

• Mentor and support intermediate engineers through code reviews, technical coaching, and knowledge sharing.
  
• Contribute to hiring activities, including technical assessments and interview processes.
  
• Collaborate closely with Product, Operations, Compliance, and Customer Success teams.
  
• Engage with founders and executive leadership on technical strategy and business-critical initiatives.
  
• Help build a high-performance engineering culture focused on ownership, quality, and execution.
  

Requirements

What it takes to succeed: 

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience.
  
• Strong commercial experience developing applications using Java.
  
• Extensive hands-on experience with Spring Framework and Spring Boot.
  
• Proven experience designing, building, and operating distributed backend systems in cloud environments.
  
• Strong understanding of relational databases, SQL, schema design, indexing, and performance optimisation.
  
• Experience designing APIs and scalable service-oriented architectures.
  
• Experience owning production systems, including monitoring, incident management, and operational support.
  
• Solid understanding of software engineering best practices, testing methodologies, and code quality standards.
  
• Ability to lead technical discussions and influence architectural direction.
  
• Strong problem-solving and decision-making capabilities.
  
• Excellent communication and stakeholder engagement skills.
  
• Comfortable operating in a fast-paced, high-growth environment.
  
• Demonstrated ability to mentor and support other engineers.
  
• Strong ownership mentality and bias towards execution.