The Senior Backend Engineer is responsible for designing, building, and maintaining secure, scalable, and highly reliable backend systems that support business-critical application workflows. The role focuses on backend architecture, API development, data integrity, security, and operational excellence across distributed systems operating at scale.
This role is accountable for ensuring backend systems meet high standards of reliability, security, and maintainability, while enabling the organization to evolve and scale its digital platforms efficiently.
Role Accountabilities
Architecting and implementing robust backend services and RESTful APIs that are secure, performant, and scalable.
Designing and maintaining stateful and stateless backend components, ensuring consistency, reliability, and fault tolerance across distributed systems.
Implementing idempotency, retry, and recovery mechanisms to ensure system resilience and data integrity under high load and partial failures.
Developing and managing event-driven and asynchronous processing workflows, including webhook and callback handling.
Applying strong API security controls, including authentication, authorization, rate limiting, and abuse prevention.
Ensuring data protection, privacy, and regulatory compliance, including consent management and secure handling of sensitive data.
Implementing encryption and key-management best practices to protect data at rest and in transit.
Designing and maintaining audit trails, logging, and monitoring to support traceability, observability, and compliance requirements.
Optimizing backend performance and scalability using appropriate database, caching, and messaging technologies.
Collaborating closely with frontend, DevOps, product, and compliance teams to deliver end-to-end solutions.
Providing technical leadership and mentorship, contributing to architectural decisions, coding standards, and continuous improvement initiatives.
Added Advantage:
Experience working with payment platforms, mobile money systems, SMS gateways, and USSD-based services will be considered a strong advantage, particularly in environments requiring high reliability, regulatory awareness, and real-time transaction processing.
Qualifications and Education Requirements:
Bachelor's degree in computer science, software Engineering, Information Technology or any other related field.
+ 5 years' experience in backend development
Payments experience (M-Pesa, Stripe, PayPal)
Node.js/Python, Java expert
PostgreSQL + Redis
RESTful API design
Data protection regulations knowledge
Security focus (encryption, OAuth 2.0)
Tech Stack: