Senior Backend Engineer - Asset Sales

M-KOPA is a fintech and digital financial services company that provides smartphones and a range of financial products to everyday earners across sub-Saharan Africa, operating in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and Uganda. The company uses an asset-financing model that allows customers to make an initial deposit on a smartphone and then pay it off through affordable daily, weekly, or monthly installments, building a credit history in the process. This approach has enabled M-KOPA to serve over 10 million customers and unlock more than $2 billion in credit for individuals who are largely excluded from traditional financial systems. M-KOPA's suite of services extends beyond device ownership to include digital loans, health insurance, device protection, and affordable data bundles, all designed to expand economic opportunity for low-income populations. The company also operates a large network of over 35,000 sales agents, many of whom are themselves beneficiaries of the economic empowerment model M-KOPA promotes. M-KOPA has been recognized among the world's top fintech companies and continues to scale its impact across the African continent. While M-KOPA is primarily categorized as a fintech company, its roots are in the renewable energy and pay-as-you-go solar sector, where it pioneered off-grid solar solutions for underserved communities before expanding into smartphones and broader financial services. This evolution reflects the company's enduring mission to connect underserved populations to transformative technologies and financial tools that improve quality of life and drive sustainable economic inclusion.

Join our expanding engineering team!

We're hiring a permanent Senior Backend Engineer to join our Asset Sales group as we scale one of the most important parts of M-KOPA's FinTech platform. Build distributed, event-driven microservices and help shape what AI-native engineering looks like at M-KOPA.

The Impact 💚

Your code will directly power the systems that put smartphones and e-motorbikes into the hands of Every Day Earners across Africa. We've already helped over 10 million customers access more than $2 billion in credit. It's your chance to be part of something that's literally transforming lives across an entire continent 🌍

The Opportunity

🎯 Mission-driven engineering: Every service you build helps expand financial inclusion for under-banked populations

🏆 Global recognition: Join a company named by the Financial Times as one of Africa's fastest-growing companies for five consecutive years (2022–2026)

🚀 Scale challenges: Build backend systems serving millions across multiple African markets

🤖 AI-native from day one: We're actively embracing AI as part of the engineering craft, not bolting it on

🌍 Fully distributed: Work remotely with diverse teams across UK, Europe, and Africa

What You'll Do

At M-KOPA, you'll build and operate distributed C# and .NET microservices on Azure, working within an event-driven architecture at significant scale. This is an outcomes-driven role: we care far more about the value you create than where you sit or how many hours you're online. You'll own what you build end-to-end — from idea, through implementation and deployment, into production and iteration.

Technical Environment 💻

• Modern C# stack: Distributed C# and .NET microservices

• Cloud & orchestration: Hosted on Azure using Kubernetes

• Architecture: Event-driven, supporting products used at significant scale

• Observability: Grafana, Azure Application Insights, logs, traces, and metrics

• AI tooling: Claude and other AI tools used throughout the engineering workflow — design exploration, code generation and review, test writing, incident investigation, and technical communication

Our Engineering Approach 🚀

• AI-native engineering: We want engineers who tinker — experimenting with new tools, agents, and workflows, and sharing what works

• Guardrails as we accelerate: Automated tests, SLOs, alerting, observability, and deployment safeguards around everything we ship

• Own it beyond the pull request: Design for idempotency, retries, out-of-order events, and failure modes, and know how your services behave in production

• The Campfire Rule: Leave the systems you touch a little better than you found them

• On-call as feedback, not heroics: Engineers who build our systems also help operate them, using incidents to make the platform more resilient

What You Need

We're looking for a senior engineer who's curious, autonomous, and highly trusted. You're comfortable owning the entire software stack — including supporting infrastructure — throughout its lifecycle, and you see production data, not just deployment, as the real measure of "done."

Required Experience:

• Strong grasp of C# and .NET development

• Experience with event-driven systems - We use Azure Service Bus, but would love to hear from you if you have experience with similar messaging technology (Kafka, RabbitMQ, etc.)

• Microservices architecture experience, ideally on Azure and Kubernetes

• Experience using observability tooling (e.g. Grafana, Application Insights) to understand production behaviour

• Comfort using AI tools as part of a daily engineering workflow (design, code review, testing, incident investigation)

• DevOps culture mindset, including on-call/production ownership

• Proven ability to collaborate effectively in distributed teams across time zones

• Continuous learning mindset and openness to feedback

Location & Benefits

• Fully remote role, collaborating during core GMT working hours

• Work with diverse teams distributed across UK, Europe, and Africa

• Personalised training budget to support your development

• Home office setup budget

• Professional development programs and coaching partnerships

• Family-friendly policies and flexible working arrangements

• Well-being support and 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

• Prosperous 💰: 70% of customers use M-KOPA products for income generation, with 35,000 livelihoods created for agents

• Green 🌱: 2.155 million tonnes of CO₂ avoided since 2010 through clean energy, refurbished devices, and e-mobility

Ready to build C#/.NET systems — with AI as part of your craft — that create real-world financial inclusion? Apply Now!

Why M-KOPA?

At M-KOPA, we empower our people to own their careers through diverse development programs, coaching partnerships, and on-the-job training. We support individual journeys with family-friendly policies, prioritize well-being, and embrace flexibility.

Join us in shaping the future of M-KOPA as we grow together. Explore more at m-kopa.com.

Recognized four times by the Financial Times as one Africa's fastest growing companies (2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026), named on CNBC's World’s Top Fintech Companies 2025 & 2026 and by TIME100 Most influential companies in the world 2023 and 2024 , we've served over 10 million customers, unlocking $2 billion in cumulative credit for the everyday earners across Africa, in addition to over 10,000 e-bikes financed in Kenya.

Important Notice

M-KOPA is an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer committed to assembling a diverse, broadly trained staff. Women, minorities, and people with disabilities are strongly encouraged to apply.

M-KOPA explicitly prohibits the use of Forced or Child Labour and respects the rights of its employees to agree to terms and conditions of employment voluntarily, without coercion, and freely terminate their employment on appropriate notice. M-KOPA shall ensure that its Employees are of legal working age and shall comply with local laws for youth employment or student work, such as internships or apprenticeships. 

M-KOPA does not collect/charge any money as a pre-employment or post-employment requirement. This means that we never ask for ‘recruitment fees’, ‘processing fees’, ‘interview fees’, or any other kind of money in exchange for offer letters or interviews at any time during the hiring process.

Applications for this position will be reviewed on a rolling basis. Shortlisting and interviews will take place at any stage during the recruitment process. We reserve the right to close the vacancy early if a suitable candidate is selected before the advertised closing date.

If your application is successful M-KOPA undertakes pre-employment background checks as part of its recruitment process, these include; criminal records, identification verification, academic qualifications, employment dates and employer references.