Software Engineering Team Lead

The Impact

Your architecture will directly shape how millions of people access credit for the first time. We've already served 10 million customers and unlocked more than $2 billion in credit since we began. Every system you design, every engineer you develop, and every decision you make contributes to a platform that's quite literally transforming financial inclusion across an entire continent 🌍

The Opportunity

🎯 Mission-driven engineering: Your daily work enables affordable smartphones, digital loans, and financial services for Africa's Every Day Earners — people for whom traditional finance simply doesn't work.

🏆 Global recognition: Join a FinTech company named by TIME 100 as one of the world's most influential and by the Financial Times as Africa's fastest-growing company for five consecutive years (2022–2026).

🚀 Scale that matters: You'll be architecting systems that process over 2 million payments daily across five markets — and building for the next 10 million customers.

🌱 Environmental impact: We're carbon-negative, having avoided 2.155 million tonnes of CO₂ emissions across our product portfolio.

What You'll Do

At M-KOPA, you'll lead a team of backend engineers through both greenfield and legacy projects, owning the full software lifecycle from design ideation through to production and eventual decommissioning. Our engineering teams work under a true DevOps culture — with infrastructure as code, observability, automated testing, and continuous delivery treated as first-order concerns, not afterthoughts.

You'll set architectural direction, partner closely with your Product Manager counterpart on roadmap planning and prioritisation, and serve as a servant leader who grows the people around you while shipping high-quality, impactful software.

Technical Environment 💻

• Languages & frameworks: C#/.NET

• Cloud: We work in Azure, and welcome experience across AWS or GCP

• Architecture: Event-driven systems and microservice development - we use Azure Service Bus, and welcome experience with similar messaging technologies such as Kafka or RabbitMQ

• Infrastructure: Kubernetes, Docker

• Observability: Prometheus, Grafana

• Engineering culture: DevOps, infrastructure as code, automated testing across all environments including production, continuous delivery

Our Engineering Approach 🚀

• Full ownership: Teams own their solutions end-to-end - from inception through production support to decommissioning.

• Servant leadership: We lead by coaching and enabling, not directing.

• Quality by default: Observability, monitoring, and automated testing are built in from day one.

• Continuous improvement: We foster a culture of innovation within a supportive, dynamic team environment.

• Product partnership: Engineering and Product work as genuine counterparts — planning together, prioritising together, delivering together.

What You Need

We're looking for an experienced, low-ego engineering leader who brings both technical depth and a genuine passion for growing people.

Required Experience:

• Strong hands-on background in C#/.NET backend development

• Proven experience with Azure, AWS, or GCP - we work in Azure but welcome experience across major cloud providers

• Solid understanding of event-driven architecture and microservice development - we use Azure Service Bus, and welcome experience with similar messaging technologies such as Kafka or RabbitMQ

• Experience leading or mentoring engineers in a collaborative team environment

• Ability to set technical direction and provide architectural guidance

• Comfortable working with Product to shape roadmaps and drive delivery

The Team

You'll lead a close-knit, focused engineering team with real end-to-end ownership over a significant part of the M-KOPA platform. You'll have a dedicated Product Manager as your counterpart and operate with genuine autonomy over technical direction.

Location & Benefits

• 🌍 Fully remote role in UK and parts of Europe within UTC -1 to UTC +3 time zones

• 💼 Work with diverse teams across the UK, Europe, and Africa

• 📈 Professional development programmes and coaching partnerships

• 👨‍👩‍👧 Family-friendly policies and flexible working arrangements

• 💚 Well-being support and genuine 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 to the mobile internet

• 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 through clean energy and circular economy products, with over 127,700 circular economy products provided

Ready to build the systems that create real-world financial inclusion while leading a talented team of engineers? 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.