Backend Product Developer

About the role

A fast-growing Nairobi-based technology company, which runs a platform combining digital marketing, social commerce, embedded payments and digital wallets across East Africa, is recruiting a Backend Product Developer. You will build and own the server-side of the platform's features, taking them from specification to production and staying with them after they ship. The team is small by design, and every engineer owns what they ship.

Key responsibilities

• Build and ship backend features in Laravel, working closely with Product, Design and the mobile/web engineers
• Design and document the REST APIs used by the Flutter mobile app and web interfaces
• Build Node.js services for webhooks, queues, notifications and scheduled jobs
• Integrate and maintain payment rails (M-Pesa, Flutterwave and other gateways), handling callbacks, retries and idempotency
• Support wallet and payout services alongside the Payments and Ledger Engineer
• Integrate email and SMS providers, and partner/marketplace APIs for embedded commerce
• Secure every endpoint and protect personal and financial data
• Monitor errors in Sentry, resolve production issues and tune slow queries and jobs
• Maintain GitLab CI pipelines and deploy via Laravel Forge to AWS

Required profile

• 3+ years building backend systems in production
• Ownership mindset: you ship, monitor, iterate and own the outcome
• Careful with money: you treat every transaction as someone's income
• Clear communicator who explains trade-offs in plain language
• Security and privacy conscious
• Comfortable at a fast startup pace without sacrificing maintainability

Required skills

• Strong PHP and Laravel (Eloquent, queues and jobs, migrations, automated testing)
• Hands-on Node.js experience for asynchronous services
• Solid MySQL (schema design, indexing, query tuning) and practical Redis use
• REST APIs with token-based auth and versioning
• Integrating third-party APIs such as payment gateways, SMS or email providers, including webhooks and failure handling
• Git/GitLab, Linux, Nginx and AWS deployments

Nice to have

• Fintech, mobile money, wallets, marketplaces or social commerce experience
• Laravel Forge, Docker, PHPUnit/Pest, Sentry
• Experience supporting Flutter or other mobile clients

What we offer

• Work on a platform that moves real money for users and businesses across East Africa
• Direct ownership of backend features, with direct access to the Head of Platform Engineering
• A modern, product-led stack: Laravel, Node.js, Flutter and AWS
• Room to grow as the business scales into new markets

Applications are made through the recruiter's application link.