Software Engineering Team Lead

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: We work in Azure, and welcome experience across AWS or GCP
• Architecture: Event-driven systems and microservice development - we use Azure Service Bus, and welcome experience with similar messaging technologies such as Kafka or RabbitMQ
• Infrastructure: Kubernetes, Docker
• Observability: Prometheus, Grafana
• Engineering culture: DevOps, infrastructure as code, 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 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, AWS, or GCP - we work in Azure but welcome experience across major cloud providers
• Solid understanding of event-driven architecture and microservice development - we use Azure Service Bus, and welcome experience with similar messaging technologies such as Kafka or RabbitMQ
• 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

The Team

You'll lead a close-knit, focused engineering team with real end-to-end ownership over a significant part of the M-KOPA platform - including loan origination, compliance systems, and a new pricing engine. You'll have a dedicated Product Manager as your counterpart and operate with genuine autonomy over technical direction.