Software Engineering Team Lead

M-KOPA Solar is seeking a seasoned Software Engineering Team Lead to spearhead the design and delivery of a next-generation loan origination architecture, compliance systems, and pricing platform. This is a high-impact leadership role embedded within our growing FinTech Engineering division — a team on a mission to expand financial access across Africa.

With over 7 million customers served and more than $2 billion in credit unlocked, M-KOPA operates at a scale where every engineering decision carries real-world weight. As Team Lead, you will shape the technical trajectory of systems that bring first-time credit access to millions of people who have historically been excluded from formal financial services. If you are a low-ego, technically deep engineering leader who thrives on both shipping quality software and growing the people around you, this role is built for you.

• Lead a team of backend engineers through greenfield builds and legacy modernisation projects, owning the full software lifecycle from design ideation to production support and eventual decommissioning.
• Set architectural direction for event-driven, microservices-based systems built on Azure, ensuring scalability, reliability, and compliance readiness.
• Partner closely with the Product Manager counterpart to jointly plan roadmaps, prioritise backlogs, and align engineering delivery with business goals.
• Champion a true DevOps culture — embedding infrastructure as code, observability, automated testing, and continuous delivery as non-negotiables from day one.
• Serve as a servant leader: coach, mentor, and develop engineers at all levels, fostering psychological safety and a culture of continuous improvement.
• Drive quality by default — integrating Prometheus and Grafana-based observability, monitoring, and automated testing across all environments including production.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with platform, data, and product teams to ensure cohesive, end-to-end solution ownership.
• Contribute to hiring, onboarding, and technical assessment processes to grow the engineering organisation.

• Demonstrate strong hands-on C#/.NET backend development capability — you must be able to code-review, architect, and when necessary write production-grade code yourself.
• Design and operate distributed systems on Azure (experience with AWS or GCP also valued); you must be comfortable with cloud-native patterns, not just basic deployments.
• Architect and implement event-driven microservices using Azure Service Bus or equivalent messaging technologies such as Kafka or RabbitMQ.
• Manage containerised workloads using Kubernetes and Docker in production environments.
• Define and enforce observability standards using tools such as Prometheus and Grafana.
• Lead and mentor backend engineers in a collaborative, DevOps-first engineering culture — you must have demonstrated experience growing engineers, not just managing delivery.
• Drive technical decision-making in partnership with product stakeholders, translating business requirements into robust architectural choices.
• Apply automated testing strategies across unit, integration, and production environments as a standard practice, not an exception.

M-KOPA offers a competitive compensation package benchmarked against senior technology leadership roles in the Kenyan and pan-African market. While the exact salary for this role has not been publicly disclosed, market estimates for a Software Engineering Team Lead of this seniority in Nairobi range from KES 350,000 to KES 600,000 per month, depending on experience depth and negotiation. M-KOPA is known for offering performance-linked incentives, comprehensive health cover, and meaningful equity or bonus participation aligned with company growth.

Ideal candidates are engineering leaders with 6+ years of backend engineering experience, at least 2 of which have been spent leading or mentoring engineering teams in a fast-paced, product-driven environment. You are someone who is equally comfortable in an architectural whiteboarding session and a one-on-one coaching conversation. You care deeply about financial inclusion and want your technical work to have tangible societal impact.

Do not apply if you are primarily a people manager with limited hands-on technical depth, if you require heavy process structure to be productive, or if you are not comfortable with full end-to-end ownership of complex distributed systems in a high-growth, ambiguous environment.

• Visit the M-KOPA Solar careers page or the platform where you discovered this listing.
• Submit your updated CV and a brief cover letter outlining your experience leading backend engineering teams and your approach to servant leadership.
• Highlight specific examples of event-driven or microservices architecture you have designed and shipped to production.
• Shortlisted candidates will be contacted for an initial screening call followed by a structured technical and leadership interview process.