Principal Backend Software Engineer

At King Makers, we build technology that powers sports and gaming experiences for millions of users across Africa.

Since 2018, we’ve grown into one of the most relevant entertainment and betting groups in the region, known for our strong in-house tech culture and relentless focus on scalability, performance, and reliability.

We believe great engineering is about clarity, impact, and ownership, not buzzwords. Our teams collaborate across several countries to solve complex technical challenges that directly affect our users and the business.

We move fast, ship often, and stay pragmatic. If you enjoy building things that scale and solving problems that matter, you’ll feel at home here.

We’re looking for a Principal Backend Engineer to take a key role in shaping the architecture and technical direction of our platform.

You’ll design systems that handle millions of transactions, improve performance across services, and ensure our technology can scale safely and efficiently as the business grows.

You’ll act as a technical leader and hands-on architect, guiding teams, raising the quality bar, and helping us make smart, sustainable engineering decisions.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Architect the future: design, implement, and evolve distributed systems that handle high throughput and millions of concurrent transactions.
• Provide technical leadership: act as a go-to expert for backend and infrastructure topics, mentoring teams and raising the overall engineering bar.
• Optimize performance: identify bottlenecks and design scalable solutions that improve availability, latency, and cost efficiency.
• Drive reliability: establish solid standards for monitoring, alerting, and incident management, ensuring our systems are observable and resilient.
• Collaborate across teams: partner with product and business leaders to translate ideas into clear technical strategies and execution plans.
• Improve continuously: challenge existing solutions, propose better patterns, and keep us aligned with modern practices in distributed systems and Dev Ops.
• Lead by example: write clean, maintainable code; review peers’ work; and ensure consistent engineering quality across services.
• Be part of on-call rotations for critical systems, focusing on root-cause prevention, not firefighting.

You’ll work with a modern, cloud-native environment including:

• Languages & Frameworks: C#, .NET 8, .NET Core
• Messaging & Streaming: Kafka, Rabbit
  
  MQ, Azure Service Bus
• Databases: SQL Server, Mongo
  
  DB, Cosmos
  
  DB, Redis
• Infrastructure & Orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes (AKS), Azure Cloud
• Monitoring & Observability: Grafana, Kibana, Application Insights

Experience with this exact stack is not mandatory, but deep technical curiosity, sound design principles, and adaptability are.

Requirements

We’re looking for someone who thrives in complexity and is driven by the pursuit of excellence. To succeed in this role, you’ll need:

• 10+ years of engineering leadership, with a proven track record of delivering large-scale, distributed systems.
• Expertise in some cloud architectures (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud), Dev Ops practices (CI/CD), Microservices (AKS), Kafka/Rabbit
  
  MQ streams and programming languages (C#, or others).
• Demonstrated ability to quickly address production incidents and implement preventive measures to avoid recurrence.
• Proven capability to maintain product quality through unit testing and end-to-end testing processes.
• The ability to foresee future challenges, craft innovative solutions, and implement strategies that drive meaningful impact.
• Exceptional communication skills to work effectively across teams and influence stakeholders at all levels.
• While iGaming experience is a plus, what matters most is your ability to solve real-world problems with creativity and precision.

Benefits

Perks

• Health Support: A monthly allowance to invest in your health and wellbeing
• Comprehensive Insurance: Extra protection and peace of mind for you and your loved ones
• Future Planning: Employer contributions towards your long-term financial security
• Performance Bonus: Discretionary rewards that celebrate your impact
• Convenience at Work: Free reserved parking at the office
• Hybrid Work: A flexible arrangement with 2 days in the office and 3 days remote each week