Software Engineering Team Lead at M-KOPA Solar

Software Engineering Team Lead at M-KOPA Solar – M-KOPA Solar Kenya Job Details

About the Role

M-KOPA Solar is recruiting a Software Engineering Team Lead for its Nairobi office. This is a full-time position leading a backend engineering team through both new product development and legacy system maintenance. The company has connected over 400,000 homes across Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda to solar power, adding approximately 550 new connections daily. As Team Lead, you will own the complete software lifecycle—from architectural design through production deployment to eventual decommissioning—while fostering a culture of technical excellence and team growth.

You will report to senior engineering leadership and work within a DevOps-first environment where infrastructure as code, observability, automated testing, and continuous delivery are core practices. This role combines hands-on technical leadership with product strategy, requiring both deep technical judgment and the ability to develop your team members through coaching and mentorship.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead a team of backend engineers through both greenfield and legacy projects, maintaining full ownership from initial design through production support and eventual retirement of systems
• Set the technical direction and architectural vision for your team’s work, with particular focus on event-driven systems and microservice architectures
• Work alongside the Product Manager to shape roadmap decisions, prioritise work, and align engineering output with business objectives
• Champion DevOps practices across your team, ensuring infrastructure as code, automated testing across all environments, and continuous delivery are implemented consistently
• Grow your team through mentorship and coaching, providing technical guidance while creating a collaborative environment where engineers can develop professionally
• Establish and maintain observability across systems using tools like Prometheus and Grafana, ensuring production visibility and fast incident response
• Make architectural decisions around event-driven patterns and microservice development, guiding your team through technologies such as Azure Service Bus

Requirements & Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent (BA/BSc/HND) in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field
• Proven hands-on experience developing backend systems in C# and .NET, with the ability to contribute code alongside your team
• Strong working knowledge of a major cloud platform—experience with Azure is preferred, but expertise in AWS or GCP is valued
• Demonstrated experience designing and building event-driven architectures and microservice-based systems; familiarity with message brokers such as Azure Service Bus, Kafka, or RabbitMQ
• Experience leading or mentoring engineers in a team setting, with a track record of developing people and fostering collaborative technical environments
• Comfort with containerisation and orchestration technologies including Docker and Kubernetes
• Ability to partner effectively with Product and other stakeholders to shape roadmaps and drive delivery; low ego and willingness to learn from colleagues

What to Expect

• A leadership role where technical depth is as valued as people management—you will remain hands-on with code and architecture rather than purely managerial
• Collaboration within a DevOps culture where quality, observability, and continuous improvement are embedded in the daily workflow and not treated as secondary concerns
• Exposure to systems operating at scale, supporting hundreds of thousands of active customers across East Africa with mission-critical energy delivery infrastructure
• This Software Engineering Team Lead at M-KOPA Solar position in Nairobi is open to qualified candidates. Click Apply below to submit your application.