Senior Backend Engineer

Join our expanding engineering team! We're hiring a permanent Senior Backend Engineer to join our Asset Sales group as we scale one of the most important parts of M-KOPA's FinTech platform. Build distributed, event-driven microservices and help shape what AI-native engineering looks like at M-KOPA. The Impact - Your code will directly power the systems that put smartphones and e-motorbikes into the hands of Every Day Earners across Africa. - We've already helped over 10 million customers access more than $2 billion in credit. - It's your chance to be part of something that's literally transforming lives across an entire continent 🌍 The Opportunity - Mission-driven engineering: Every service you build helps expand financial inclusion for under-banked populations - Global recognition: Join a company named by the Financial Times as one of Africa's fastest-growing companies for five consecutive years (2022–2026) - Scale challenges: Build backend systems serving millions across multiple African markets - AI-native from day one: We're actively embracing AI as part of the engineering craft, not bolting it on - Fully distributed: Work remotely with diverse teams across UK, Europe, and Africa What You'll Do - At M-KOPA, you'll build and operate distributed C# and .NET microservices on Azure, working within an event-driven architecture at significant scale. - This is an outcomes-driven role: we care far more about the value you create than where you sit or how many hours you're online. - You'll own what you build end-to-end — from idea, through implementation and deployment, into production and iteration. Technical Environment - Modern C# stack: Distributed C# and .NET microservices - Cloud & orchestration: Hosted on Azure using Kubernetes - Architecture: Event-driven, supporting products used at significant scale - Observability: Grafana, Azure Application Insights, logs, traces, and metrics - AI tooling: Claude and other AI tools used throughout the engineering workflow — design exploration, code generation and review, test writing, incident investigation, and technical communication Our Engineering Approach - AI-native engineering: We want engineers who tinker — experimenting with new tools, agents, and workflows, and sharing what works - Guardrails as we accelerate: Automated tests, SLOs, alerting, observability, and deployment safeguards around everything we ship - Own it beyond the pull request: Design for idempotency, retries, out-of-order events, and failure modes, and know how your services behave in production - The Campfire Rule: Leave the systems you touch a little better than you found them - On-call as feedback, not heroics: Engineers who build our systems also help operate them, using incidents to make the platform more resilient What You Need We're looking for a senior engineer who's curious, autonomous, and highly trusted. You're comfortable owning the entire software stack — including supporting infrastructure — throughout its lifecycle, and you see production data, not just deployment, as the real measure of "done." Required Experience: - Strong grasp of C# and .NET development - Experience with event-driven systems - We use Azure Service Bus, but would love to hear from you if you have experience with similar messaging technology (Kafka, RabbitMQ, etc.) - Microservices architecture experience, ideally on Azure and Kubernetes - Experience using observability tooling (e.g. Grafana, Application Insights) to understand production behaviour - Comfort using AI tools as part of a daily engineering workflow (design, code review, testing, incident investigation) - DevOps culture mindset, including on-call/production ownership - Proven ability to collaborate effectively in distributed teams across time zones - Continuous learning mindset and openness to feedback Location & Benefits - Fully remote role, collaborating during core GMT working hours - Benefits package, which includes Bonus, Growth Shares & On-Call Allowance - Work with diverse teams distributed across UK, Europe, and Africa - Personalised training budget to support your development - Home office setup budget - Professional development programs and coaching partnerships - Family-friendly policies and flexible working arrangements - Well-being support and career growth opportunities

Our Mission

We create financial inclusion for the traditionally excluded through a fair, flexible, customer-centric financing model. We strive to drive greater inclusion of women, youth, and low-income communities. Our Impact - Connected: 2.5 million first-time smartphone users connected - Prosperous: 70% of customers use M-KOPA products for income generation, with 35,000 livelihoods created for agents - Green: 2.155 million tonnes of CO₂ avoided since 2010 through clean energy, refurbished devices, and e