Software Engineering Team Lead

About this role

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Join our growing FinTech Engineering team! We're recruiting a Software Engineering Team Lead to spearhead the delivery of our new loan origination architecture, compliance systems, and pricing platform - infrastructure that will power M-KOPA's next phase of expansion across Africa.

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THE IMPACT

Your architecture will directly shape how millions of people access credit for the first time. We've already served over 7 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 🌍

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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 - including loan origination, compliance systems, and a new pricing engine. You'll have a dedicated Product Manager as your counterpart and operate with genuine autonomy over technical direction.

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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…