Senior Backend Engineer (Go) - Payments Platform

About the role

Afrisend is a licensed money transfer operator, operating and regulated in multiple markets, and is building a new payments platform in Go. You will be one of the first engineers on the team, designing and building core services that move real money: balances and ledgers, the APIs our partners integrate with, and integrations with payment providers.

Key responsibilities

• Design and build backend services in Go that handle payments end to end.
• Build ledger and balance logic where every movement of money is accurate, auditable and safe to retry.
• Design and document APIs for external partners, contract-first.
• Integrate with third-party payment providers, including handling unreliable callbacks and reconciliation.
• Own correctness through strong automated testing, including concurrency and failure cases.
• Run what you build: monitoring, alerting and on-call once services carry live money.
• Take part in design and code reviews and help set the team's engineering standards.

Required profile

• 5+ years building backend services, with 3+ years of production Go.
• Experience with money or other data where a duplicate or lost write is a real incident: payments, ledgers, wallets, banking, billing or trading.
• Clear written English, as much of the design work happens in documents.

Required skills

• Strong PostgreSQL: schema design, transactions and isolation levels, migrations on live data, row-level security or similar.
• Event-driven systems in production: message brokers, at-least-once delivery, idempotent consumers, retries and dead-letter handling.
• API design for external consumers: versioning, idempotency keys, error models, webhooks.
• Security habits: secrets management, least privilege, never logging PII.

Nice to have: remittance, mobile money (M-PESA, Daraja), PesaLink or bank integration experience in East Africa; double-entry accounting or ledger building; multi-tenant SaaS, especially B2B APIs with sandbox environments; RabbitMQ, NATS JetStream, Watermill, Chi, testcontainers; hexagonal or ports-and-adapters architecture in Go; exposure to KYC, sanctions screening or regulatory compliance.