Principal Software Engineer (Payments Platforms)

About this role

FairMoney is a pioneering mobile banking institution specializing in extending credit to emerging markets. Established in 2017, the company currently operates primarily within Nigeria, and it has secured nearly €50 million in funding from renowned global investors, including Tiger Global, DST, and Flourish Ventures. In alignment with its vision, FairMoney is actively constructing the foremost mobile banking platform and point-of-sale (POS) solution tailored for emerging markets. The journey began with the introduction of a digital microcredit application exclusively available on Android and iOS devices. Today, FairMoney has significantly expanded its range of services, encompassing a comprehensive suite of financial products, such as current accounts, savings accounts, debit cards, and state-of-the-art POS solutions designed to meet the needs of both merchants and agents. FairMoney thrives on its diverse workforce, bringing together talent from over 27 nationalities. This multicultural team drives the company’s mission of reshaping financial services for underserved communities.To gain deeper insights into FairMoney’s pivotal role in reshaping Africa’s financial landscape, we invite you to watch informative video . About the team Payments Platforms owns the systems that move money at FairMoney — the rails, the ledger, and the integrations with banks and processors. Every disbursement, repayment and transfer runs through what this team builds, and it has to be correct whether it's midday Monday or 3am on a public holiday when a switch upstream starts timing out. Requirements you have 5+ years of experience and a track record of technical leadership. you've worked in payments, banking or fintech, and you know how ledgers, settlement and reconciliation actually behave you have 2+ years of experience with Go, Java, .NET or TypeScript you've built distributed, event-driven systems and understand how they fail you're strong at API design and have integrated with external third parties at scale you have deep experience with relational databases — PostgreSQL or MySQL — including schema design, query optimisation, indexing and transactions you've worked with messaging and streaming systems like Kafka, RabbitMQ, SNS or SQS you've built and operated highly available, resilient, observable systems you're a strong debugger — you're the person others come to when production is confusing What you'll be working on We're hiring a Principal Engineer to help shape the technical direction of that platform. We rely heavily on the following tools and technologies: Go for our services PostgreSQL and MySQL for persistent storage Kafka, RabbitMQ, SNS and SQS for asynchronous messaging Kubernetes and Docker to run our services AWS for most of our infrastructure Responsibilities Direct integrations with banks, switches and payment processors across Nigeria Design, build and maintain the APIs and services that handle money movement at scale. Contribute to the architecture of the payments platform — service boundaries, data ownership, and the guarantees we make. Build for failure: idempotency, retries, reconciliation and settlement across systems we don't control. Debug and resolve critical production issues across services and multiple levels of the stack. Lead design reviews and set the standard for engineering quality across the team. Mentor senior engineers and grow payments expertise in the org. Work closely with product, risk, operations and partner-facing teams. Benefits Private Health Insurance Pension Plan Training & Development Remote work Paid Time Off Recruitment Process HR Screening: 30 minutes Hiring Manager Interview: 30 minutes Technical interview with the Engineering team: 60 minutes.