At KingMakers, 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.
About The RoleWe’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 DevOps.
- 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, RabbitMQ, Azure Service Bus
- Databases: SQL Server, MongoDB, CosmosDB, 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), DevOps practices (CI/CD), Microservices (AKS), Kafka/RabbitMQ 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
Top Skills
What We Do
KingMakers is the leading sports and digital entertainment platform company across the African continent.
We are focused on creating opportunity. Opportunity that allows individuals and communities to realise their dreams – to be the best they can be. Opportunities to grow, to change, to build a business, to make a difference. Opportunity for individuals. Opportunity for our communities.
Our proprietary technology, delivered through our agency and online platforms, brings sports fans and their communities closer to the games they love.
We do this by building products and content experiences that delight our customers daily, that empower our partners and sustain their communities.
That’s why at the heart of KingMakers is a passion to empower individuals and to give back to the community. We do this by allowing agents in our network to grow their own business and in so doing enrich the communities in which we operate.
Our goal is always to put the customer first : by combining technology, customer insight and talent we strive to give African sports fans a superior, more rewarding and engaging experience, online, offline 24/7.
Our Values:
• Customer Focus
• Passion & Dedication
• Openness, Honesty & Directness
• Innovation & Big Thinking
• Ownership & Accountability
• Speed & Focus
• Low Ego
• Fun
