---
title: 'Senior Backend Engineer at M-KOPA'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-backend-engineer-m-kopa-nairobi-6tn1j1ntjr5t'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-21'
---

# Senior Backend Engineer at M-KOPA

- **Company:** [M-KOPA](https://feeny.ai/companies/m-kopa)
- **Location:** Nairobi, Kenya
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-09-14
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-21
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/m-kopa/f86c6921-fa3c-4dea-be16-962e0080b516

## Job description

Join our expanding engineering team! We're actively recruiting a Senior Backend Engineer to help scale M-KOPA Mobility, our fast-growing e-mobility business. This is an initial 12-month Fixed Term Contract, with the potential to extend or transition into a permanent role. Build the event-driven microservices that power clean, affordable transport for riders and entrepreneurs across Africa.

The Impact – Africa's transport sector is massive, underserved, and at an inflection point, and the transition to electric is accelerating, led by East Africa. Your code will directly power the technology behind Kenya's leading e-mobility financing platform. We've already financed over 11,000 electric motorbikes, helping riders save more than $3 a day and cutting air pollution by 90%. It's your chance to build tech for a business that's literally transforming lives across an entire continent 🌍

The Opportunity 🎯 Mission-driven engineering: Every service you build helps put clean transport within reach of riders who'd otherwise be locked out of ownership 🏆 Global recognition: Join a company named by the Financial Times as one of Africa's fastest-growing companies for 5 consecutive years running (2022–2026) 🚀 Scale challenges: Build backend systems for a business growing at 3x year-on-year, with over 11,000 e-motorbikes financed and demand climbing 🌱 Real climate impact: Electric is simply better for drivers, cities, and the planet — our e-motorbikes cut air pollution by 90% versus petrol equivalents

## What You'll Do

At M-KOPA, you'll build sophisticated event-driven microservices with real-world impact. Our engineering teams own their solutions end-to-end – from architecture decisions to production monitoring. Join us in combining cutting-edge .NET development with purpose-driven engineering that makes digital and financial inclusion possible across Africa.

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 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
- AI tooling: We use AI coding tools including Claude Code as part of our engineering workflow

Our Engineering Approach 🚀 As an engineer, you will work as a collaborator. More senior members will coach and contribute, placing an emphasis on:

- High quality output
- Observability and monitoring
- Automated testing in all environments, including production
- Infrastructure as code and DevOps practices

## What You Need

We expect you to be comfortable working as part of a team which owns the entire software stack, including supporting infrastructure, throughout the entire software lifecycle, from inception through production to decommissioning under a DevOps culture. You'll value the constraints that continuous delivery places upon engineering processes and embrace testing and observability as first-order concerns in development. Required Experience:

- Strong grasp of C# .NET development
- Experience with event-driven systems – Service Bus or similar messaging technologies such as Kafka or RabbitMQ
- Microservices architecture experience
- Experience with Azure, or other major cloud providers such as AWS or GCP
- Familiarity with containerisation and orchestration tools (Kubernetes, Docker)
- Experience with observability tools such as Prometheus and Grafana
- Testing and deployment expertise
- DevOps culture mindset
- Experience working with AI coding tools, ideally Claude Code or similar

Location & Benefits

- Initial 12-month Fixed Term Contract, with potential to extend or transition into a permanent role
- Fully remote role within UTC -1 to UTC +3 time zones
- Work with diverse teams across UK, Europe, and Africa
- Professional development programs and coaching partnerships
- Family-friendly policies and flexible working arrangements
- Well-being support and career growth opportunities

Our Mission 🌍 We create financial inclusion for the traditionally excluded through a fair, flexible, customer-centric financing model, with M-KOPA Mobility extending that same model to clean transport. We strive to drive greater inclusion of women, youth, and low-income communities.

Our Impact 💚

- Connected 📱: 6 million smartphone customers, 2.5 million first-time smartphone users
- Prosperous 💰: 70% of customers use their M-KOPA product for income generation, with 35,000+ livelihoods created for agents
- Green 🌱: 11,000+ e-motorbikes financed, growing 3x year-on-year, cutting air pollution by 90% and helping riders save more than $3 a day

Ready to build C# .NET solutions that put clean, affordable transport within reach of Every Day Earners, while advancing your career in modern backend engineering? At M-KOPA, we empower our people to own their careers through diverse development programs, coaching partnerships, and on-the-job training. We support individual journeys with family-friendly policies, prioritise well-being, and embrace flexibility. Apply now to join our mission of transforming lives across Africa through technology.

Why M-KOPA? At M-KOPA, we empower our people to own their careers through diverse development programs, coaching partnerships, and on-the-job training. We support individual journeys with family-friendly policies, prioritize well-being, and embrace flexibility.

Join us in shaping the future of M-KOPA as we grow together. Explore more at [m-kopa.com](http://m-kopa.com).

Recognized four times by the Financial Times as one Africa's fastest growing companies (2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026), named on CNBC's World’s Top Fintech Companies 2025 & 2026 and by TIME100 Most influential companies in the world 2023 and 2024 , we've served over 10 million customers, unlocking $2 billion in cumulative credit for the everyday earners across Africa, in addition to over 10,000 e-bikes financed in Kenya.

Important Notice

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/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.

## About M-KOPA

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: M-KOPA is a leading African fintech platform that provides affordable financial and digital products to cash-based earners, enabling them to finance everyday essentials through daily micropayments.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Growth Stage)
- **Headquarters**: Nairobi, Kenya (Global HQ with additional offices in London, UK)
- **Founded**: 2010
- **Founders**: Jesse Moore (CEO & Co-Founder) and Nick Hughes

## Core Business
- **Primary Industry**: Fintech / Financial Services
- **Target Customers**: B2C focused on "Every Day Earners" — underserved, cash-based entrepreneurs and individuals across Sub-Saharan Africa who lack formal collateral, credit history, or a monthly salary.
- **Mission/Purpose**: "To make financing for everyday essentials accessible to everyone." Their core mission is to "finance progress" for millions of unbanked and underbanked people.

## Products & Services
- **Smartphone Financing**: The core entry product. Customers pay a small deposit (e.g., ~$35) followed by daily micro-instalments (~$0.50/day) via mobile money (like M-Pesa) to own a smartphone. This is the primary gateway to the digital economy.
- **Digital Loans**: After building a repayment credit history, customers can access small, flexible digital loans on an instalment basis.
- **Hospital Coverage (Insurance)**: Affordable health insurance packages offered via the same daily micropayment model.
- **Device Protection**: Insurance for the financed smartphone.
- **Affordable Data Bundles**: Digital subscriptions and data packages available on a similar instalment basis.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed. However, M-KOPA has raised substantial growth capital from top-tier global investors.
- **Key Metric**: Over **$1.5 billion in cumulative credit deployed** to more than **5 million customers** across Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana, and South Africa. [m-kopa.com](https://www.m-kopa.com/about)
- **Notable Investors**: Includes **Generation Investment Management** (co-founded by Al Gore), **Sumitomo Corporation**, and other leading impact and growth investors. Board members often come from these firms. [m-kopa.com](https://www.m-kopa.com/about)
- **Growth Signals**: M-KOPA now employs over **3,000 staff members** and has a direct sales force of over **30,000 agents**. The company operates one of the largest smartphone assembly factories in the region, producing over 1 million phones locally. [wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Kopa)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Proprietary Tech & Data Stack**: Processes over **1 million payments daily**, using AI-driven analytics to create credit records for individuals with no formal financial history. This is a deep, defensible data moat.
- **Asset-Light Distribution**: A massive, managed direct sales force of 30,000 agents provides a powerful on-the-ground distribution network that is hard to replicate.
- **Customer-Centric Lending**: Offers "Inclusive, Fair, and Flexible" terms. No collateral or proof of income required. Customers can return a product, get their deposit back, and be released from obligations if they cannot pay. This builds immense trust. [m-kopa.com](https://www.m-kopa.com/about)
- **Vertical Integration**: From smartphone assembly to fintech lending to digital services, M-KOPA controls the entire value chain, creating a sticky ecosystem.

## Strategic Focus
- **Deepening Financial Services**: Expanding beyond smartphone financing into digital loans, insurance, and health coverage to become a comprehensive financial partner.
- **Geographic Expansion**: Already in 5 African countries (Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa) with potential for further market entry.
- **Leveraging AI for Credit Scoring**: Constantly improving their proprietary data models to offer more products and better manage risk for a traditionally "unscoreable" population.
- **M-KOPA Labs**: A research arm that deploys grants to test new technologies and extensions of their platform. [wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Kopa)

## Why Work Here
- **Purpose-Driven Mission**: The work directly impacts financial inclusion and poverty alleviation for millions across Africa. A deeply motivating "why."
- **Rapid Growth & Scale**: Operating in a high-growth environment with a team of 3,000+, providing significant opportunities for career advancement and tackling complex, real-world problems.
- **Global, Pan-African Team**: A diverse team with a "proudly Pan-African footprint" and offices in London, offering a unique cultural experience.
- **Flexible Work**: Offers hybrid and remote working options that suit the demands of the role. [m-kopa.com](https://www.m-kopa.com/careers)
- **Strong Benefits Package**: Includes comprehensive health plans, learning & development resources, and recognition & rewards. They emphasize a culture of "Progress, Excellence, and Humility." [m-kopa.com](https://www.m-kopa.com/careers)
- **Engineering Culture**: Known for building a world-class tech stack from scratch for a unique market.

## Sources
1. [m-kopa.com/about](https://www.m-kopa.com/about)
2. [m-kopa.com/careers](https://www.m-kopa.com/careers)
3. [wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Kopa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Kopa)
4. [uk.linkedin.com/company/m-kopa](https://uk.linkedin.com/company/m-kopa)
5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/m-kopa](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/m-kopa)

## Other roles at M-KOPA

- [Sales Executive - Ojo 3](https://feeny.ai/job/sales-executive-ojo-3-m-kopa-lagos-tz58mkgffn7x) — Lagos, Nigeria
- [Sales Executive - Badagry 2](https://feeny.ai/job/sales-executive-badagry-2-m-kopa-lagos-f7e1c7mr31a0) — Lagos, Nigeria
- [Sales Executive - Lagos 2](https://feeny.ai/job/sales-executive-lagos-2-m-kopa-lagos-m58sdrh4tv4b) — Lagos, Nigeria
- [Senior Manager, Communications](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-manager-communications-m-kopa-south-africa-8zaatgjkp8ra) — South Africa
- [Customer Care Quality Analyst](https://feeny.ai/job/customer-care-quality-analyst-m-kopa-ghana-brs069h1pmtk) — Ghana
- [Senior Backend Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-backend-engineer-m-kopa-london-503v9zgh5t22) — London, United Kingdom
- [Internal Audit Senior](https://feeny.ai/job/internal-audit-senior-m-kopa-kenya-3hew7n87wfwq) — Kenya
- [Internal Audit & Investigations Senior Associate](https://feeny.ai/job/internal-audit-investigations-senior-associate-m-kopa-kenya-ycsax83sr5vt) — Kenya
- [Influencer Marketing Intern](https://feeny.ai/job/influencer-marketing-intern-m-kopa-nairobi-vnm9kh0jzzt6) — Nairobi, Kenya
- [Internal Audit & Investigations Senior Associate](https://feeny.ai/job/internal-audit-investigations-senior-associate-m-kopa-kenya-z4rcxmxbng44) — Kenya