Job Description
Summary - About KUDA
Kuda, which means ‘love’ in Shona, is more than a fintech - it’s a movement to make financial services accessible, affordable, and truly rewarding for every African.
Backed by over $100 million from some of the world’s most respected investors, we’re building a smarter alternative to traditional banking - offering seamless money transfers, business banking, and instant access to credit, all through your device.
At Kuda, we don’t just build products - we build people. We share the love in how we collaborate, carry everyone along as we grow, break boundaries to challenge what’s possible, and show up every day committed to doing better.
If you’re driven by purpose, excited by impact, and ready to help redefine the future of finance in Africa, you’ll feel right at home here.
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.
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.
Why join Kuda?
At Kuda, our people are the heart of our business, so we prioritise your welfare. We offer a wide range of competitive benefits in areas including but not limited to:
💜A great and upbeat work environment populated by a multinational team
👴Pension
📈Career Development & growth
😁Competitive annual leave plus bank holidays
🎁Competitive paid time off (Parental, Moving day, Birthday, Study leave etc)
💯Group life insurance
💖Medical insurance
🎁Well-fare package (Wedding, Compassionate and etc)
✅ AwardCo
🏃♀️Goalr - employee wellness app
🥇Award winning L&D training
💒 We are advocates of work-life balance, working in a hybrid in office schedule
Kuda is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. We value diversity and anyone seeking employment at Kuda is considered based on merit, qualifications, competence and talent.
We don’t regard colour, religion, race, national origin, sexual orientation, ancestry, citizenship, sex, marital or family status, disability, gender, or any other legally protected status. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.
