Senior Backend Engineer

Kuda is a full service, app-based digital bank. Our mission is to be the go-to bank not just for those living on the African continent, but also for the African diaspora wherever they might live, anywhere in the world. Kuda is free of ridiculous banking charges and great at helping customers budget, spend smartly and save more. We raised the largest seed round ever seen in Africa, and completed a Series A funding round in February 2021, led by some of the world’s smartest venture capital investors. With offices in London (our HQ), Lagos and Cape Town, and further offices opening across Africa during 2021, Kuda is fast becoming recognised as the leading ‘Neobank’ for Africans.

To help us grow into the company that can bring meaningful change to the way people across Africa get access to great financial products and services in order to take control of their personal finances, we are actively looking for bright, talented, driven people who are excited by our mission. If this sounds like a great way to spend your valuable time, then please get in touch with us.

Role Overview

• As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will own the reliability, scalability, and developer experience of our distributed systems — and you will help define what we invest in each quarter.
• You will sit at the intersection of infrastructure, architecture, and technical strategy, with the reach to shape how every squad at Kuda ships software.

Responsibilities

• Ecosystem architecture: Build shared platform services, internal SDKs, and developer tooling that other teams adopt — your output multiplies squad output, not just your own.
• Quarterly initiative definition: Partner with engineering leadership, product, and finance to identify, scope, and prioritise platform investments with clear business outcomes (uptime = revenue, deploy frequency = faster GTM).
• Event-driven infrastructure: Own Kafka clusters end-to-end — topic design, partition strategy, consumer lag management, schema evolution, and failure recovery at scale.
• Caching & state layer: Lead Redis patterns across the org: cluster mode, pub/sub, distributed locks, eviction policies, and scripting for low-latency financial workloads.
• Engineering velocity: Drive DORA metrics practice — deploy frequency, lead time, change failure rate, and MTTR — turning data into quarterly engineering decisions, not just dashboards.
• Platform standards: Define and enforce observability, alerting, service mesh, and on-call standards across all squads.
• Write the RFCs and ADRs the org builds from.
• Build vs. buy decisions: Lead the evaluation of open-source tooling vs. custom builds — with a track record of getting both right.
• Fintech compliance: Embed audit trails, data residency, and PCI/SOC-aware patterns into platform design from day one, not as an afterthought.
• Mentorship at scale: Grow mid and senior engineers through architecture reviews, pairing, and written craft — making knowledge transfer a force multiplier, not a bottleneck.

Requirements

• 8+ years in software engineering with at least 4 years in a platform, SRE, or infrastructure-focused role — with clear evidence of building systems other teams depended on.
• Deep Kafka experience: partition strategy, consumer group design, exactly-once semantics, and failure recovery in production.
• Redis at scale: cluster mode, pub/sub, eviction policies, and distributed lock patterns.
• Strong proficiency in .NET (C#) and/or Python within high-throughput microservices architectures.
• Experience processing high-volume, low-latency financial transactions with the compliance requirements that come with them.
• DORA fluency: you have used it to drive real engineering improvements and presented those results to leadership.
• A portfolio of internal platforms, SDKs, or shared libraries that other teams adopted — and continued to use after you moved on.
• Fintech, payments, or regulated financial services background — you understand what compliance boundaries mean for infrastructure decisions.

How to Apply

Interested and qualified candidates should click on this link to apply online.