About Kappa

African businesses import $600 billion worth of goods and services per year but paying their suppliers abroad remains a massive challenge. Their options today are limited to traditional banks and the black market. Going through banks means poor customer service, high transaction costs and unfavorable exchange rates. Transactions that should take a few days end up taking weeks and cost merchants up to 9% in fees. The situation is equally dire for consumers who pay some of the highest P2P transfer fees in the world and are stuck with mobile money technology that is now decades old. We are building Kappa to fix that. Our cross-border payments platform is designed for ultra low-cost, near-instant money transfer at significantly higher transaction sizes than what’s currently possible. Our mission is to break down the barriers that have held back African businesses for decades.

About the opportunity

Kappa is looking for software engineers at mid- and senior-level to join the team and help build out our B2B fintech product suite. Coming in early, you will work on all aspects of design and implementation of our cross-border payments platform and the mobile and web apps that interface with it. Part of a globally distributed team spread across Africa, Europe and North America, this role comes with significant autonomy and ownership, and offers a chance to help build a massive business that will have a positive impact on millions of lives. We have big ambitions as we scale up in existing markets and roll out in new ones. We are looking for a superstar engineer with matching ambition to help drive that expansion.

What you'll do

• As a hands-on engineer, you'll build products and features from scratch and take end-to-end ownership of your work — from drafting requirements to deploying to production

• You'll work in a tight feedback loop with the founders and the rest of the team on pushing the product forward and launching in new markets. We like to move fast and stay nimble.

• You'll help build out Kappa's engineering team and drive our roadmap, our design principles, and the makeup of our team and culture

What you'll bring

• 4+ years of professional software development, with at least 2 years of working in Go

• Strong technical chops — see “Our stack” below

  • Compiled and interpreted languages

  • Relational and non-relational DBs

  • Messaging and queuing systems like Kafka or RabbitMQ

  • Serverless and micro-services architectures

  • Modern CI/CD workflows and tooling

• Customer-first mindset and strong ownership mentality. You’re fast and you get things done to a high standard with minimal direction

• Fintech experience is a plus but not required (e.g. payments, investing, lending, etc.)

We’re especially keen to speak to candidates who have done work on trading systems, accounting and ledgering systems (centralized/decentralized), automated market making, on-/off-ramp integrations (cash, mobile money, cards) and information security topics (handling PII data, PCI-DSS certifications, SOC2, etc.).

Our stack

Backend is written in Go top-to-bottom. Frontend is built in React, Flutter and NextJS. Everything talks over gRPC and Kafka internally, and HTTP/REST externally. Data models are defined in Protobuf, and data is stored in Postgres and a centralized ledger DB. All of our code runs on Kubernetes in AWS. We use Terraform and ArgoCD to manage our infrastructure and CI/CD requirements.

We use various third-party services for specialized functions such as compliance (transaction monitoring, identity verification), ledgering and connecting to local payment rails. We work with local bank partners/BaaS providers in the different jurisdictions we operate in.

What we offer

• Highly competitive salary and equity — top of market. We believe in hiring fewer but better people and paying them more.

• Health, dental and vision insurance (for you and your dependents)

• Remote-first — Work from our offices in Douala or Barcelona, or remotely from any Africa-friendly timezone (GMT+3h to GMT-2h). Travel to Africa to meet with customers and other team members is encouraged but not required.

• New MacBook Pro and up to $2,000 for home office equipment (headphones, chair, standing desk, etc.)

• Parental leave / family-friendly culture

• Unlimited paid time off