Backend Engineer – Digital Payments

Job Title: Backend Engineer – Digital Payments
Employment type: Contract
Contract length: 6 months
Location: Nairobi, Kenya
PURPOSE OF THE PROJECT
We are looking for a Backend Engineer with strong ownership, coordination, and delivery discipline, specialising in Java based systems and cloud native development on AWS. This role is essential to sustaining high performance, scalable, and secure backend services that support mission critical payment platforms and ensure operational continuity across cross-functional systems.
The Backend Engineer will design, develop, and maintain robust microservices using Java, leveraging AWS services to build resilient, distributed architectures. Collaborate closely with product, DevOps, and engineering teams to manage system integrations, dependencies, and deployment pipelines.
Additionally, the engineer will contribute to performance optimisation, system reliability, and continuous improvement initiatives, supporting predictable and high-quality delivery in a fast paced, highly regulated environment.
Core Responsibilities and Accountabilities:

• Design and implement backend changes required for Tokenisation, including token service enrolment flows, host system changes, and operational backend processes.
• Develop and integrate CYBS (CyberSource) service backend components into the M-Pesa payment stack, following agreed integration architecture.
• Implement backend support for push provisioning app enhancements, including secure token storage, provisioning state management, and notification services.
• Build and maintain logging, monitoring, and alerting infrastructure for all initiative-specific backend services, ensuring operational visibility pre- and post-production launch.
• Execute and support backend functional testing, including integration tests, regression suites, and performance benchmarking; log and remediate defects to agreed SLAs.
• Collaborate with team on end-to-end integration design, ensuring backend services expose well-formed, documented APIs.
• Support knowledge transfer by co-authoring technical runbooks, system design documentation, and onboarding guides for client engineering counterparts.
  

Knowledge and Experience:

• 6+ years backend engineering experience, with at least 4 years in payments, fintech, or financial services.
• Strong proficiency in one or more: Java, Python, Go, Node.js, or equivalent enterprise grade backend languages.
• Deep experience with payment platform integrations, including host side changes, transaction processing, and tokenization or push payment systems.
• Proven ability to design and document scalable, resilient backend architectures.
• Experience leading code reviews and mentoring junior/intermediate engineers.
• Experience with RESTful API development and consumption.
• Familiarity with database technologies (relational and/or NoSQL) and SQL querying.
• Understanding of security best practices in payment systems (PCI-DSS awareness, secure coding).
• Experience with logging, monitoring, and observability tooling.
• Strong written communication; ability to produce technical documentation.
• Backend languages: Java, Python, Go, Node.js, or equivalent.
• Databases: PostgreSQL / MySQL / Oracle / MongoDB / equivalent.
• API frameworks: Spring Boot, Express.js, FastAPI, or equivalent.
• Testing: JUnit, pytest, Postman, or equivalent; test automation frameworks.
• Version control: Git (GitHub / GitLab / Bitbucket).
• Containerization: Docker, Kubernetes where applicable.
• Issue tracking: Jira / Azure DevOps.
• Documentation: Confluence / SharePoint.
  

Mandatory Skills:

• Bachelor's degree in Technology, or a related field (Master's preferred).
• Previous experience within Banking, Digital Payment & Card solutions or the FinTech industry.
• Excellent communication skills (written, verbal, and presentation) in English.
  

Preferred Skills:

• Direct experience with M-Pesa backend systems or comparable mobile money platforms.
• Experience with event driven or messaging architectures (Kafka, RabbitMQ, or equivalent).
• Containerization and orchestration experience (Docker, Kubernetes, or equivalent).
• Experience with performance/load testing of backend services.
  

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