Backend Engineer at Safaricom Kenya

Brief Description

Reporting to the Solutions Engineering Lead, the role holder will be responsible for designing, building, and maintaining backend services and integrations that power scalable, resilient automation solutions across Safaricom’s enterprise platforms. This includes the evolution of existing service applications, integration with internal and external platforms, and occasional support for frontend feature integration. The role is backend-heavy but benefits from full stack awareness.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, test, deploy, and maintain scalable backend services and APIs.
• Write clean, efficient, and secure code for various backend components and services.
• Work closely with product owners, technical leads, and other engineers to deliver features on time.
• Collaborate with frontend engineers to support integration and prototyping needs.
• Provide technical guidance, mentorship, and code reviews for junior and mid-level engineers.
• Participate in architectural discussions and influence design decisions.
• Champion engineering best practices, including DevSecOps and CI/CD.
• Ensure application performance, monitoring, and fault tolerance for enterprise-grade solutions.
• Contribute to the automation of enterprise and sales onboarding workflows.
• Participate in code inspection, testing, and continuous refactoring efforts.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Software Engineering, IT, or related field.
• 3+ years of hands-on experience in software development in a busy IT environment.
• Strong programming skills in Java or Kotlin (Spring Boot preferred), with additional experience in C#, Python, or related languages.
• Solid experience with microservices architecture, service orchestration, and API design.
• In-depth understanding of relational and NoSQL databases, stored procedures, and messaging/streaming systems.
• Proficiency in RESTful APIs, web technologies (REST/JSON, XML, WSDL, XSD), and integration patterns.
• Solid understanding of cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including serverless computing and containerization.
• Experience with DevSecOps practices, CI/CD pipelines, and tools like Jenkins, Git, SonarQube, JMeter, etc.
• Experience working in Agile/Scrum development environments.
• Strong problem-solving skills with a solid grasp of data structures and algorithms.
• Passion for collaborative work, mentoring, and continuous improvement.