Staff Software Engineer

Role Overview

You'll join a small, high-performing team of engineers and product leaders shaping how we scale our platform and our impact. From your first day, you will have the opportunity to work closely with the founding team based across London & Paris to shape the product vision and all parts of our technical architecture. As we scale our products and deepen our presence across emerging markets, this is a role that builds technology to solve customer problems. To do that, you must have empathy and curiosity to get to the root cause of the issue and the creativity to build a solution that balances impact, effort, and delight.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead by technical example – your influence comes from the quality of your work, your judgment and your ability to bring others along with you, not from authority.
• Own technical direction within your team and workstream, collaborating closely with principal engineers and the Head of Engineering to align with broader architectural strategy.
• Mentor senior engineers through pairing, code reviews and design discussions – raising the technical floor of the people around you.
• Champion engineering best practices across the team, introducing standards and patterns that improve consistency, reliability and developer experience.
• Act as a subject matter expert in your core technical domain, and be the person others turn to when the problem is hard.

Delivery Excellence

• Lead the end-to-end delivery of complex, multi-stakeholder projects – from scoping and design through to deployment, feedback and iteration.
• Translate ambiguous problem spaces into clear technical plans, breaking down large initiatives into well-defined milestones that the team can execute against.
• Manage delivery dependencies across teams and communicate progress clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Drive a culture of outcome-oriented delivery within your workstream – focused on impact shipped, not activity completed.
• Proactively identify and remove blockers before they slow the team down.

Operational Excellence

• Take ownership of the reliability and observability of systems within your domain – ensuring they are monitored, well-understood and resilient to failure.
• Handle production incidents with confidence, leading postmortems that result in genuine process improvements rather than just documentation.
• Set the standard for what good operational practice looks like within your team – monitoring, alerting, runbooks and on-call hygiene.
• Contribute to company-wide reliability initiatives led by principal engineers and the Head of Engineering.

Technical Excellence

• Make and defend strong architectural decisions within your workstream, balancing pragmatism with long-term technical health.
• Write production-quality code consistently – this is a fully IC role and hands-on technical contribution is expected at all times.
• Drive scalability, modularity and performance improvements in the areas of the codebase you own.
• Champion code quality through rigorous testing, thoughtful documentation and constructive code reviews that develop the engineers around you.
• Proactively identify technical debt and lead initiatives to address it before it compounds.

Culture

• Communicate internally and externally about new features, be it collecting feedback pre-implementation or explaining them on launch.

Requirements

• A product mindset is core to how we build – everyone at Capi is encouraged to think about the customer, the business, and the long-term impact of what we ship.
• Experience in a VC-backed or high-growth engineering team and building products used by customers.
• You are comfortable working in an early-stage startup environment with high pace, rapid growth, involvement in the entire product development process, and a high degree of ambiguity.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills for expressing ideas, designs, and potential solutions with both technical and non-technical team members and customers.
• You care about our mission and solving the problems faced by African businesses.
• Based in London or Paris.
• Speak and write in French & English.
• Experience in Fintech, payments, wallets or building ledgers.
• Expertise in security and data protection best practices needed in a FCA regulated business.

Current Projects

• Automated payouts and AI invoice approval.
• Onboarding & payment automation with Swift network and banking partners across the world.
• WhatsApp bot that creates quotes for customers based on their responses.
• Self-serve onboarding flow that collects company information and KYC documents from customers.
• Asynchronous workers that OCR invoices.
• Internal tooling to manage and process millions of dollars of transactions.

Interview Process

• Screen interview with our Tech Recruiter Gracie (30 min) – Learn about the Capi story and mission. Whilst ensuring we are aligned as an exciting opportunity for what you're looking for.
• Technical challenge with one of our Staff Engineers (1 hr) – Demonstrate your abilities in a whiteboard-style interview with one of our senior team members. We like to keep this as natural as possible, as if you were joining us tomorrow. This interview is to assess your skills, interests, and potential to see the impact you could make. While also ensuring Capi can support your growth.
• Deep dive (1 hr) – Meet the hiring manager and explore your relevant experience and our upcoming projects.
• Founder chat (30 min) – Meet the founders to learn about Capi's growth plans, mission, and revenue targets. This is also your opportunity to ask any final questions to make sure our journey is right for you.
• References.
• Offer!

Additional Information

This is a full-time position with a competitive salary, share options, and benefits. We would be looking to hire for this role by June 2026, but are happy to align with notice periods as required. Capi is an equal opportunity employer and welcomes candidates from diverse backgrounds.

Accessibility and Support

We’re all about building a diverse, inclusive team at Capi. Whoever you are, we’d love to hear from you. If there’s anything you need to make the interview process easier—whether it’s accessibility support, a different format, or just a heads-up about what to expect—just let us know, we’re happy to help.