Principal Backend Software Engineer

At KingMakers, we’re not here to follow the industry, we’re here to define it.

We are a proudly homegrown African company, building the future of sports and iGaming entertainment across the continent. Since our launch in 2018, we’ve created platforms that connect millions of fans to the excitement they love through our leading brands, BetKing and SuperSportBet.

From Nigeria to South Africa, we’ve rapidly grown into a powerhouse, recognized for raising standards, pushing boundaries, and shaping what’s next in our industry. Our vision is bold: to be the home where Africa plays.

Collaboration, innovation, and fearless execution define our culture. Every decision is purposeful, every interaction impactful, and every product designed to serve our players and partners with excellence.

We move fast, stay curious, and constantly raise the bar. Our mission is to deliver entertainment with integrity, innovation, and impact - because great products can change how entire communities experience play.

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 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.

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 vary by location, but here's what you can expect as part of the KingMakers package:

• Hybrid work model - 2 days onsite, 3 remote.
• Competitive annual leave allowance + public holidays + your birthday off.
• Private medical cover.
• Flexible compensation plan for meals and transport.
• Discretionary annual bonus based on company and individual performance*
• Regular team breakfasts, offsites, and local events.
• Work with global teams across Nigeria, South Africa, Malta, Madrid & the UK.

*Discretionary bonus eligibility is subject to onboarding cycle and start date. Employees joining after 1 October 2026 may not be eligible for the current bonus cycle.

KingMakers is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to building diverse, inclusive teams that reflect the communities and markets we serve across Africa and beyond, regardless of background, identity, race, gender or experience.