Senior Backend Engineer / Lead at Africa Electronic Trade Group

AeTrade Group is recruiting qualified technology professionals to support the development and deployment of AeTrust , a digital financial services platform designed to advance financial inclusion, digital inclusion, MSME empowerment, secure payments, and sustainable business growth. AeTrust will support wallet services, merchant payments, digital onboarding, KYC workflows, payment integrations, operational dashboards, and future integration with AeTrade Group’s wider ecosystem, including Sokokuu and AeLearning. We are seeking professionals who can build secure, scalable, reliable, and user-centered digital financial products for high-trust and high-impact use cases. AeTrade Group is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer / Lead for the AeTrust platform. The successful candidate will lead the development of secure and scalable backend services, with direct responsibility for high-risk and security-critical systems related to ledger operations, payment integrations, wallet balances, money movement, reconciliation, and core financial services. The role will serve as the senior technical point of contact across backend engineering and will provide technical direction, code review, architectural guidance, production support, and mentorship to the backend team. Key Responsibilities Lead the design, development, and maintenance of secure backend services and APIs. Own backend systems that are critical to correctness, security, reliability, and financial integrity. Lead development of ledger, payment integration, wallet, reconciliation, settlement, and money movement services. Provide technical direction and review across backend engineering work. Set and uphold backend engineering standards, including code quality, testing, documentation, reliability, and security practices. Own production reliability and incident response for backend systems, including security-related incidents. Review and improve backend architecture, service boundaries, API contracts, and database design. Support integration with payment providers, banking partners, mobile money providers, and other third-party systems. Mentor backend engineers and support the growth of the engineering team. Work closely with product, compliance, operations, security, and business teams to ensure systems meet operational and regulatory needs. About You Required Qualifications and Experience Minimum of 5 years of backend engineering experience. Strong production experience with Java and Spring Boot. Strong experience with microservices, gRPC, REST APIs, and PostgreSQL. Experience with database schema design and migrations using Flyway or equivalent tools. Demonstrated experience with financial systems, ledger systems, payment integrations, mobile money, banking systems, or similarly high-consequence transactional systems. Ability to own production incidents independently, including urgent reliability or security-related issues. Comfortable reading and debugging Python and/or Node.js/TypeScript codebases. Strong understanding of secure API design, authentication, authorization, auditability, and system reliability. Experience mentoring or leading a small backend team. Preferred Experience Prior fintech, banking, wallet, payment, lending, or mobile money experience. Experience in Ethiopia, East Africa, or other emerging-market financial technology environments. Experience with event-driven systems, reconciliation, treasury, settlement, or fraud/risk systems. Experience working in regulated financial services environments. Key Competencies Strong technical judgment. High ownership and accountability. Security-first mindset. Ability to work under pressure. Strong communication and documentation skills. Ability to mentor and guide others. Strong problem-solving ability in high-stakes systems.