Senior Software Engineer

Job Title: Senior Software Engineer
Location: Nairobi, Kenya
Reports to: Senior Manager Engineering
About The Role
The Senior Software Engineer is a core technical leader responsible for the hands-on development and architecture of our mission-critical backend platform.

Main Objectives & Responsibilities

• System Design & Implementation: Lead the end-to-end design, development, and deployment of robust, highly scalable, and secure event-driven microservices using Java and Spring Boot.
• Quality Assurance: Champion the adoption of engineering best practices, particularly Test-Driven Development (TDD), to ensure code quality, maintainability, and long-term stability.
• Collaboration: Work closely with Product Managers, DevOps, and other engineering teams to translate complex business requirements into technical specifications and delivered features.
• Mentorship: Provide technical guidance and mentorship to junior team members, raising the overall technical bar of the engineering organization.

Contribution & Impact
This role directly impacts the organization's strategic goals by modernizing and scaling the core platform infrastructure. Your output will be the creation of high-performing, resilient services that drive business capabilities, significantly improving platform stability and enabling faster feature delivery to our customers. Experience with functional programming, particularly Clojure, will provide an immediate advantage in evolving our current technology stack.

Key Responsibilities

• Backend Development

• Design, develop, and maintain high-performance backend services using Java Spring Boot (or similar frameworks) and Clojure.

• Adhere to clean code principles and industry best practices in all development efforts.

• Ensure code quality through pair programming, code reviews, and other collaborative development methods.

• Event-Driven Architecture

• Implement and maintain event-driven systems using message brokers (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ, or cloud-native equivalents).

• Work on publish/subscribe patterns and streaming data pipelines to ensure real-time data processing and system responsiveness.

• Optimize event flow for performance and scalability.

• Test-Driven Development (TDD)

• Apply TDD principles throughout the software development lifecycle to deliver robust, maintainable solutions.

• Write comprehensive unit tests, integration tests, and end-to-end tests.

• Ensure high test coverage and effectively diagnose, document, and fix bugs.

• Architecture and Design

• Collaborate with architects and senior engineers to define microservices architecture and component interaction.

• Contribute to architectural discussions and decision-making processes, ensuring scalability, security, and maintainability of solutions.

• Integrate best practices for secure coding, data privacy, and compliance.

• Performance Optimization

• Monitor system performance, identify bottlenecks, and implement solutions for performance tuning.

• Conduct profiling, load testing, and implement caching strategies to enhance system response times.

• Work closely with the DevOps team to optimize CI/CD pipelines for quick and reliable deployments.

• Collaboration and Leadership

• Mentor junior engineers on best practices, coding standards, and new technologies.

• Collaborate with product managers, QA engineers, and DevOps to deliver features on time and with high quality.

Qualifications And Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
• 5+ years of professional experience in software development, preferably in a modern backend environment.
• Strong proficiency in Java and proven, hands-on experience developing production-grade applications with Spring Boot.
• Expertise in designing, building, and operating event-driven microservices architectures.
• Proven ability to apply and advocate for Test-Driven Development (TDD) methodologies.
• Direct experience with message brokers/queues (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ) for inter-service communication.
• Solid knowledge of relational and NoSQL databases, caching layers (e.g., Redis), and RESTful API design.
• Working experience with CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab CI) and DevOps practices.
• Experience with version control systems, particularly Git.
• Excellent communication skills, problem-solving abilities, and a collaborative, team-oriented mindset.

Preferred Qualifications

• Exposure to Clojure or other functional programming languages.
• Hands-on experience with Docker and container orchestration platforms (e.g., Kubernetes).
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) for deploying and scaling services.
• Familiarity with monitoring and observability tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack).
• Knowledge of serverless computing environments.

The Ideal Candidate Is Someone Who

• Is an Architectural Driver: Functions as a self-driven leader capable of owning projects end-to-end, from initial design to robust production-ready deployment.
• Thrives Under Pressure: Excels in a fast-paced, high-volume environment, viewing complex technical challenges as opportunities for innovative solutions.
• Champions Quality: Is a staunch advocate for Test-Driven Development (TDD) and applies clean code principles to ensure high test coverage and long-term stability.
• Breaks Down Complexity: Proactively identifies and breaks down ambiguous architectural and performance problems into actionable, testable components.
• Is a Technical Mentor: Uses their deep expertise to provide mentorship and elevate the performance, standards, and technical knowledge of the entire engineering team.
• Embraces Evolution: Is passionate about the future of the stack, eager to explore and integrate new technologies like Clojure and cloud-native tools while maintaining stability in the core Java platform

Company Overview
Ezra provides B2B digital lending solutions for emerging markets in partnership with mobile and digital wallet operators and financial service providers. Ezra supports 24 operations in 23 countries, across Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Our key office locations are in Nairobi, Kenya and Dubai, UAE.

Our flagship products are Airtime Credit Services (ACS), Nano and BNPL.

• ACS is an airtime or data advance offered to prepaid mobile subscribers at the point of low credit.
• Nano is a micro cash advance offered to mobile wallet users on demand.
• BNPL facilitates payment installments for products and services

As a FinTech company, our business is entirely technology and data driven, from determining subscriber eligibility, generating relevant offers, managing risk, loan issuance, recovery, optimizing performance and reporting, reconciliation and billing.

Each day we process approximately 21M loan requests and 1.4 TB of data across our markets. This process needs to be robust, reliable and secure.

But it doesn't end there. We're exploring new ways of using our platform and transactional data to improve our products and develop new product opportunities.