Senior Backend Engineer

About Kora

Kora is the marketplace for everything payments. We offer a robust payment API for payment collections, disbursements and conversions for businesses anywhere in Africa.

Our vision, which is at the core of what we do every day, is to create a world void of digital financial barriers. We are committed to delivering reliable, secure, and easy-to-use digital financial solutions to every single customer with a guarantee that it is improving their lives. To achieve this mission, we need people like you.

We strongly believe in our ability to find Water in the Desert and pick the Sands in the Ocean.

We value positive energy, and clear communication and are committed to building an inclusive environment for people from every background.

Requirements

This is a high-impact, collaborative role responsible for driving outcomes across the product and engineering team. You would be working with relevant stakeholders across the different teams within the organization to help define and implement tools and solutions to meet the business objectives.

The role covers all stages, from requirements gathering, systems design, implementation, testing and operational support.

As a Senior Backend Engineer at Kora, you will focus on building new scalable features, optimizing and maintaining existing features, participating heavily in code and technical reviews, working closely with other engineers in the team to guide with implementation and technical direction, research and suggest new ways to improve our application and processes.

You will be heavily involved in designing, optimising, and implementing the next phase for our applications and backend infrastructure as we continue to scale and meet the ever-growing demands of our merchants and the business.

Reporting Relationships & Stakeholder Engagement:

• Report to the CTO working in the busy Backend team and the ever-innovative Engineering Team.
• Working collaboratively with our CTO (Chief Technology Officer), Product Management, Product Design, Business, Compliance, and IT Team to ensure each merchant is onboarded in a professional, timely manner.
• Strong working relationship with Managing Team / Directors / Team Leads around the business.

What you’ll be doing

1. Designing, implementing, and maintaining secure large-scale payment solutions to support our merchants and the business
2. Collaborating with relevant stakeholders to improve and optimize the reliability and performance of current applications, and implementations.
3. Collaborating with relevant stakeholders to improve engineering standards, tooling, and processes.
4. Participating actively in code and technical reviews.
5. Document development phases and monitor, and debug systems.

What you’ll need

1. 4+ years of experience building large-scale and data-intensive applications. This includes but is not limited to expertise in building large-scale and performant applications, working with large data, microservices, distributed systems, data and database optimization, etc.
2. Familiarity with our commonly used technology choices including Node.js, Typescript, and MySQL.
3. Experience working on low latency, high throughput distributed systems & with micro-service architectures.
4. Attention to detail.
5. Excellent communication and prioritization skills.
6. Deliberate drive to constantly improve and get better.
7. Experience engaging in collaborative multi-functional teams.
8. Experience with test frameworks and writing quality tests.
9. A strong desire to give our merchants a great experience using our payment infrastructure.

Benefits

• Health insurance
• Sponsored and tailored training
• Paid parental leave
• Paid time off
• Flexible work style
• Annual performance bonus
• Low-interest loans
• Employee assisted programs
• Day off on your birthday 🎂 🎁 🎉
• Employee resource groups that provide supportive communities within Kora
• Great company culture and the opportunity to work with a highly collaborative team building something great!

Note: We recognize imposter syndrome is real - any candidate who does not perfectly fit every characteristic of this role is still strongly encouraged to apply.