Senior Backend Engineer (Go) at Afrisend Money Transfer Limited

Afrisend is a licensed money transfer operator, operating and regulated in multiple markets. We are building a new payments platform in Go and forming the team that will build it from the ground up.You will be one of the first engineers on the team. You will design and build core services that move real money: balances and ledgers, the APIs our partners integrate with, and integrations with payment providers.

RESPONSIBILITIES

1. Design and build backend services in Go that handle payments end to end.
2. Build ledger and balance logic where every movement of money is accurate, auditable, and safe to retry.
3. Design and document APIs for external partners, contract-first.
4. Integrate with third-party payment providers, including handling unreliable callbacks and reconciliation.
5. Own correctness through strong automated testing, including concurrency and failure cases.
6. Run what you build: monitoring, alerting, and on-call once services carry live money.
7. Take part in design and code reviews, and help set the team's engineering standards.

What you bring

1. 5+ years building backend services, with 3+ years of production Go.
2. Strong PostgreSQL: schema design, transactions and isolation levels, migrations on live data, row-level security or similar.
3. Experience with money or other data where a duplicate or lost write is a real incident: payments, ledgers, wallets, banking, billing or trading.
4. Event-driven systems in production: message brokers, at-least-once delivery, idempotent consumers, retries and dead-letter handling.
5. API design for external consumers: versioning, idempotency keys, error models, webhooks.
6. Security habits: secrets management, least privilege, never logging PII.
7. Clear written English. Much of our design work happens in documents.

Nice to have

1. Remittance, mobile money (M-PESA, Daraja), PesaLink or bank integration experience in East Africa.
2. Double-entry accounting knowledge, or having built a ledger.
3. Multi-tenant SaaS, especially B2B APIs with sandbox environments.
4. RabbitMQ, NATS JetStream, or Watermill; Chi; testcontainers.
5. Hexagonal or ports-and-adapters architecture in Go.
6. Exposure to KYC, sanctions screening, or regulatory compliance.