Senior Backend Engineer – Retail

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 core distributed systems, shaping the technical strategy that powers every squad.

Key responsibilities

• Design and deliver 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: topic design, partition strategy, consumer lag management, schema evolution and failure recovery.
• Lead Redis patterns across the organization, including cluster mode, pub/sub, distributed locks and low‑latency scripting.
• Drive DORA metrics practice (deploy frequency, lead time, change failure rate, MTTR) and turn 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 and make 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 building systems that other teams depend on.
• Deep expertise with Kafka in production (partitioning, consumer groups, exactly‑once semantics).
• Strong experience with Redis at scale.

Required skills

• Kafka
• Redis
• DORA metrics
• Observability and alerting tools
• Service mesh
• Audit‑trail implementation
• PCI and SOC compliance patterns
• Platform standards (RFC, ADR)