Tech Lead - Payments Engineering

About the role

Watu, a fintech operating across Africa and Latin America, provides device financing and financial services to customers excluded from the formal financial system. As Tech Lead of the Payments Engineering squad, you are the technical authority for your team of 4-6 engineers, reporting to the Head of Engineering and working as a peer of the Product Owner. The location is flexible, Europe or Nairobi.

Key responsibilities

• Own the architecture, API contracts, data models and integration patterns, and the architectural decision records for the squad.
• Enforce engineering standards: GitHub, mandatory PR review, coverage gates, OpenAPI documentation, runbooks and secrets management.
• Represent the squad to the Platform General Architecture and escalate cross-squad concerns.
• Review and approve all pull requests, define the Definition of Done, and own the release process.
• Drive sprint planning with the Product Owner, translating user stories into technical tasks and surfacing risks early.
• Manage 4-6 direct reports (backend, frontend/mobile and QA engineers): unblock them, give timely feedback, and support their growth.
• Lead technical onboarding of new payment providers and ensure observability events and metrics exist for all PSP integrations.

Required profile

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 2 years as the de facto technical authority for a product area or team.
• Proven ability to review code across the full stack of your domain.
• Experience in an Agile/Scrum or Kanban environment, driving sprint ceremonies and backlog refinement with a Product Owner.
• Clear, direct communicator with engineers, Product and the Head of Engineering.
• Strongly preferred: fintech or payments experience in Africa or LATAM, and experience governing external engineering partners or SaaS vendors.

Required skills

• Java backend development (primary language)
• Mobile money APIs such as MPESA and Airtel Money, in production at scale
• Payment reconciliation systems and double-entry accounting logic
• PCI-DSS or equivalent payment security standards
• Event-driven architecture, Kafka or equivalent message brokers
• OpenAPI/Swagger documentation and CI/CD practices