Backend Engineer

Kora is a pan-African fintech company providing a comprehensive payments marketplace that enables businesses to collect, disburse, and convert payments across Africa through secure APIs. The Backend Engineer role focuses on designing, building, and scaling reliable backend systems that power Kora’s payment infrastructure, supporting merchants with high-performance, secure, and resilient services as the platform continues to grow.

As a Backend Engineer at Kora, you will play a critical role in building and scaling the systems that power our payment infrastructure. You will work closely with product, design, compliance, and engineering stakeholders to deliver secure, high-performance backend solutions that support merchants across Africa. This role spans the full software development lifecycle, from requirements gathering and system design to implementation, testing, deployment, and operational support.

Responsibilities:
- Design, implement, and maintain secure, scalable backend services for payment solutions.
- Build and optimize large-scale, high-performance systems to support growing transaction volumes.
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams to improve system reliability and application performance.
- Participate actively in code reviews and contribute to technical design discussions.
- Document development processes, monitor systems, and debug production issues.
- Continuously improve engineering standards, tooling, and development workflows.

Requirements:
- At least 3 years of experience building large-scale, data-intensive backend applications.
- Strong experience with Node.js, TypeScript, and relational databases such as MySQL.
- Hands-on experience with microservices and distributed system architectures.
- Proven ability to work on low-latency, high-throughput systems.
- Experience writing automated tests and using testing frameworks.
- Excellent communication skills, attention to detail, and a strong drive for continuous improvement.

Benefits:
- Health insurance, paid time off, and paid parental leave.
- Flexible work style with remote-first culture.
- Sponsored training, performance bonuses, and wellness support programs.

This role reports to the Engineering Lead and supports Kora’s mission to remove digital financial barriers.