Senior Data Engineer — Payments Infrastructure

Adaeze Eze

Full-time · Senior · Lagos

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About the role

We are building the payment rails for Africa. Not a metaphor — actual payment infrastructure connecting mobile money wallets, bank accounts, USSD systems, and card networks across 26 markets, from Lagos to Nairobi to Accra to Johannesburg to Casablanca. We process over 4 million transactions per day. We handle 14 currencies. We operate in regulatory environments that differ substantially from one country to the next and change more often than any static integration can accommodate. The data problem is proportionally complex. Every transaction generates events across multiple systems — our core ledger, mobile money partner APIs, local banking rails, fraud scoring, and compliance screening. Joining those streams, making them consistent, and making them queryable in near-real-time is the data engineering problem we are hiring for. We have a small, excellent data team — five engineers currently — and the infrastructure they have built is genuinely impressive for a company at our stage. We are looking for a Senior Data Engineer who can own the real-time data platform, extend it as we enter new markets, and raise the engineering standard of a team that is already good.

Responsibilities

Own the real-time data pipeline from transaction event ingestion through to the analytical layer — reliability and correctness are the primary metrics
Design the data integration pattern for new market launches: each new country adds local rail APIs, regulatory data requirements, and currency handling that must be incorporated cleanly
Build and maintain data quality validation and reconciliation reporting that the Finance and Compliance teams can rely on
Set engineering standards for the data team: pipeline structure, testing requirements, monitoring, and incident response
Mentor mid-level engineers on the team and contribute to hiring decisions as the team grows

Requirements

6+ years of data engineering with production experience on high-volume, high-reliability event-driven systems
Kafka for real-time transaction event streaming — you understand consumer groups, partition strategy, and exactly-once semantics
Python for pipeline development, data transformation, and tooling at a senior level — your code should set the standard, not require a review to fix
Apache Spark for batch processing and large-scale historical data analysis across our transaction archive
GCP — BigQuery, Dataflow, and Pub/Sub — our primary cloud platform
SQL for analytical model design and the data quality validation queries that keep reconciliation honest
Experience working with financial transaction data: idempotency, reconciliation, and the specific data quality requirements of regulated payment systems

Benefits

$128,000 – $158,000 base salary (USD) plus equity — we are pre-Series B and equity is meaningful
Full remote — our team spans West Africa, East Africa, UK, and Europe, and async is how we actually work
30 days annual leave — we take rest seriously
$2,500 annual learning and conference budget
This is infrastructure for a continent — the scale of the mission is real