Principal Infrastructure Engineer (Remote, Anywhere) at M-KOPA Solar

The scale and impact of our work is massive. M-KOPA is a fast-growing Fin Tech company offering millions of underbanked customers across Africa access to life-enhancing products and services. From our roots as the pioneer in pay-as-you-go “PayGo’” solar energy for off grid homes, we have grown into one of the most advanced connected asset financing platforms in the world, empowering a broad range of customers to achieve progress in their lives.

Technology at M-kopa

We are scaling up every technology team to build on of the world’s most innovative Fin Tech platforms. Our technical teams are fully remote, and engineers thrive on a mix of collaboration and autonomy. We hire great people and then trust them to get work done without putting artificial barriers in front of them. We organize the department by discipline and function, so everyone has the chance to pick a lane—but also grow outside, building skills in an environment where good engineering is respected.

You can join our journey too.

We’re looking for a Principal Infrastructure Engineer to join our Technical Department who’s collaborative, systematic and an automation expert. The Cloud IT Infrastructure Team at M-KOPA supports our teams to stay on the frontline of modernization, scalability, security and efficiency of a complex and quickly growing cloud environment. Your main objective will be to design, develop, and maintain M-KOPA’s infrastructure for application hosting and integration. You will also be responsible for supporting teams in CI/CD and DevOps practices.

To achieve this, you’ll be expected to:

• Support our services using Microsoft Azure, specifically Azure Kubernetes Service, with some legacy services hosted on traditional VMs.
• Be directly responsible for our shared hosting infrastructure.
• Be the only dedicated infrastructure engineer on a team of 20+ software developers.
• Empower developers themselves to manage 90%+ of infrastructure work (e.g. CI/CD, resource scaling, observability, etc.) within a framework that you manage.
• Work an on-call shift, but only occasionally, e.g. :1 week per month; the rest of the on-call rotation will be handled by other engineers within the team (which further increases the incentive to ensure that our other engineers understand our infrastructure!)
• Be involved in networking configuration for 3rd party service integrations and be a key player in security audits for all of our services.
• Be involved in migrating legacy services onto a uniform, modern hosting infrastructure.
• Be involved in application development, depending on our infrastructure workload and your interest.
   

You Might Be A Good Fit If You…

• Have a degree in computer science or a related field, or equivalent experience/learning. (We care much more about your skills than about how you acquired them)
• Have at least 3+ years of experience working as a professional software engineer/architect. You should have at least one role focused on infrastructure or be able to make a strong case for why you think you’re ready for your first infrastructure role.
• Have experience with the management of application hosting infrastructure in Microsoft Azure (note: experience with Azure Kubernetes Service is not required, although it would be helpful – you will need to learn AKS though)
• Have experience with infrastructure-as-code and an understanding in its value as an approach.
• Have strong computer networking skills and experience with network security/configuration.
• Have strong DevOps mentality; you should have an orientation towards eliminating bottlenecks and enabling a broad team of software engineers to deliver value based on a robust shared infrastructure/processes.
• Strong interpersonal skills and the ability to work as a productive member of a fairly flat team that invests explicitly in a positive and supportive workplace culture.
• Commitment to inclusivity and a belief that “engineering is for everyone”.
   

This position will report to the Head of Backend Engineering and can be based anywhere where possible to work within a time zone -1/+3 hours UTC. We can offer a full-time permanent contract of employment to candidates’ resident in the UK, Kenya, Uganda or Nigeria, where our offices are based, together with a competitive salary (dependent on skills and experience), company bonus (dependent on company performance and OKRs), and a range of company benefits. For applicants who are resident in countries outside of where our offices are based, we can offer a 3 year consultancy contract, together with a freelance daily rate and an annual bonus incentive. You will also need to travel as needed to Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, and/or Ghana to engage with our customers and in-country teams.

M-KOPA is an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer committed to assembling a diverse, broadly trained staff. Women, minorities, and people with disabilities are strongly encouraged to apply.

M-KOPA does not collect/charge any money as a pre-employment or post-employment requirement. This means that we never ask for ‘recruitment fees’, ‘processing fees’, ‘interview fees’ or any other kind of money in exchange for offer letters or interviews at any time during the hiring process.