Senior Backend Engineer

About the role

Kuda is building a smarter alternative to traditional banking across Africa. As a Senior Backend Engineer you will own the reliability, scalability, and developer experience of our distributed systems, shaping the technical strategy that powers every squad.

Key responsibilities

• Design and build shared platform services, internal SDKs, and developer tooling that amplify squad productivity.
• Partner with engineering leadership, product, and finance to define quarterly platform initiatives with clear business outcomes.
• Own end‑to‑end Kafka clusters, including topic design, partition strategy, consumer lag management, schema evolution, and failure recovery.
• Lead Redis patterns across the organization: cluster mode, pub/sub, distributed locks, eviction policies, and low‑latency scripting.
• Drive DORA metrics practice to turn deployment data into quarterly engineering decisions.
• Define and enforce observability, alerting, service‑mesh, and on‑call standards; author RFCs and ADRs.
• Evaluate open‑source vs. custom tooling, making build‑or‑buy decisions.
• Embed audit trails, data‑residency, and PCI/SOC‑aware patterns into platform design from day one.
• Mentor mid‑ and senior‑level engineers through architecture reviews, pairing, and written craft.

Required profile

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 4 years focused on platform, SRE, or infrastructure roles.
• Proven track record of building systems that other teams depend on.
• Deep expertise with Kafka production environments and Redis at scale.

Required skills

• Kafka (topic design, partitioning, consumer groups, exactly‑once semantics)
• Redis (cluster mode, pub/sub, distributed locks, scripting)
• Distributed systems architecture
• Observability and alerting tools
• Service‑mesh technologies
• DORA metrics (deploy frequency, lead time, change failure rate, MTTR)
• Fintech compliance patterns (audit trails, data residency, PCI/SOC)
• Platform engineering and SRE best practices