Senior Backend Engineer

Salary range: Commensuration with experience
Job type: Independent Contractor
Work location: Remote
Work schedule: GMT Timezone and business hours.
Starting date: Immediate

About The Role:

The Senior Backend Engineer is responsible for developing, maintaining, and optimizing scalable backend systems that support our remittance platform. The role involves building robust APIs, integrating third-party financial services, ensuring data integrity and security, and deploying services to AWS. The engineer will work closely with cross-functional teams to ensure the platform is reliable, secure, and compliant with financial regulations.

As a senior member of the engineering team, the post-holder is also expected to provide technical leadership, mentor backend engineers, drive architectural decisions, and lead the adoption of AI-augmented engineering practices and AI/ML capabilities (such as LLM integrations, fraud and AML intelligence, and intelligent customer-facing flows) that are increasingly central to a modern
remittance platform.

Key Responsibilities:

• Design, develop, and maintain backend services and RESTful APIs using Python and Django.
• Manage and optimize PostgreSQL databases for performance and scalability.
• Integrate with external payment gateways, KYC/AML services, and FX rate providers.
• Collaborate with product, frontend, and operations teams to build features that support remittance workflows.
• Deploy and maintain cloud infrastructure using AWS services such as RDS, Lambda, S3, and CloudWatch.
• Write clean, maintainable, and testable code with appropriate unit and integration tests.
• Monitor application performance, troubleshoot issues, and implement fixes.
• Ensure data security, compliance, and logging for financial transactions and user data.
• Provide technical leadership: lead architecture reviews, system design, and code review standards; mentor backend engineers and raise the technical bar across the team.
• Drive adoption of AI-assisted engineering tools (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot) within the team, defining usage guidelines, code review norms, and security guardrails for AI-generated code in a regulated financial environment.
• Design and build AI/ML-powered features for remittance – including LLM-driven flows, fraud and anomaly detection, transaction-monitoring intelligence, and conversational money-transfer interfaces – with appropriate safety, audit, and explainability controls.
• Integrate large language model APIs (Anthropic, OpenAI, or equivalent) into production services with proper evaluation, observability, cost controls, prompt-injection defences, and PII handling.
• Own engineering quality and operational excellence: incident response, post-mortems, SLO/performance tracking, and continuous improvement of the platform.

Skills Required:

• Proficiency in Python and Django web framework.
• Strong understanding of relational database design and optimization, particularly PostgreSQL.
• Experience deploying applications on AWS (RDS, Lambda, S3, IAM, etc.). Familiarity with RESTful API design and token-based authentication (e.g., JWT, OAuth).
• Competency with version control systems like Git and container tools like Docker. Knowledge of secure coding practices and handling sensitive data.
• Ability to write and maintain automated tests (unit, integration). Working knowledge of LLM-based application development: prompting, embeddings, retrieval (RAG), tool-use/function calling, and structured evaluation.
• Proficiency using AI-assisted development tools (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, or equivalent) responsibly for production code in a financial-services context.
• Understanding of AI safety and risk in regulated environments: prompt-injection defences, data leakage prevention, hallucination handling, model evaluation, and audit logging of AI-driven decisions. Familiarity with modern AI integration standards such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and agentic-workflow patterns
• Strong system-design skills for distributed, event-driven services and the ability to lead architectural decisions for new platform capabilities.

Experience & Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or related field
• Equivalent practical experience
• 5+ years of experience in backend development, preferably in a financial technology or payments environment, with at least 2 years in a senior or lead role.

Please apply by sending your CV and a cover letter to hr@oapay.co with the subject headline as “Senior Backend Engineer”.

We appreciate all applications; however, only shortlisted candidates will be contacted. If you do not hear from us within two weeks of your application, unfortunately, your application has been unsuccessful for this position.