Backend Engineering Team Lead in Leeds

Join our growing FinTech Engineering team! We're recruiting a Backend 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.

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.

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 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: Azure
• Architecture: Event‑driven systems and microservice development (Service Bus)
• Engineering culture: DevOps, infrastructure as code, observability and monitoring, 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 backend 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 cloud services
• Solid understanding of event‑driven architecture and microservice development (Service Bus, RabbitMQ, Kafka etc)
• 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 team of three engineers – two senior engineers with longer tenure and one mid‑level engineer who joined more recently. The team is just under a year old, with a dedicated Product Manager as your counterpart. It's a tight‑knit, focused group with real ownership over a significant part of the M‑KOPA platform.

Location & Benefits

• Fully remote role 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

Equal Opportunity Statement

M‑KOPA is an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer committed to assembling a diverse, broadly trained staff. Women, minorities, and people with disabilities are strongly encouraged to apply. M‑KOPA explicitly prohibits the use of forced or child labour and respects the rights of its employees to agree to terms and conditions of employment voluntarily, without coercion, and freely terminate their employment on appropriate notice. M‑KOPA shall ensure that its employees are of legal working age and shall comply with local laws for youth employment or student work, such as internships or apprenticeships. M‑KOPA does not collect or charge any money as a pre‑employment or post‑employment requirement. This means that we never ask for recruitment fees, processing fees, interview fees, or any other kind of money in exchange for offer letters or interviews at any time during the hiring process. Applications for this position will be reviewed on a rolling basis. Shortlisting and interviews will take place at any stage during the recruitment process. We reserve the right to close the vacancy early if a suitable candidate is selected before the advertised closing date. If your application is successful M‑KOPA undertakes pre‑employment background checks as part of its recruitment process, these include: criminal records, identification verification, academic qualifications, employment dates and employer references.