Software Engineering Team Lead

Join our growing FinTech Engineering team! We're recruiting a Software Engineering Team Lead to spearhead the delivery of our new loan origination architecture, compliance systems, and pricing platform - infrastructure that will power M-KOPA's next phase of expansion across Africa. The Impact Your architecture will directly shape how millions of people access credit for the first time. We've already served over 7 million customers and unlocked more than $2 billion in credit since we began. Every system you design, every engineer you develop, and every decision you make contributes to a platform that's quite literally transforming financial inclusion across an entire continent 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 (20222026). 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 CO 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. Location & Benefits Fully remote role within UTC -1 to UTC +3 time zones Work with diverse teams across the UK, Europe, and Africa Professional development programmes and coaching partnerships Family-friendly policies and flexible working arrangements Well-being support and genuine 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 Our technology has created measurable change: Connected : 2.5 million first-time smartphone users connected to the mobile internet Prosperous : 70% of customers use M-KOPA