Systems Engineer

About Kappa African businesses import $700 billion worth of goods and services per year but paying their suppliers abroad remains a massive challenge. Their options today are limited to traditional banks and the black market. Going through banks means poor customer service, high transaction costs and unfavourable exchange rates. Transactions that should take a few days end up taking weeks and costing merchants up to 9% in fees. The situation is equally dire for consumers who pay some of the highest P2P transfer fees in the world and are stuck with mobile money technology that is now decades old. We are building Kappa to fix that. Our cross-border payments platform is designed for ultra low-cost, near-instant money transfer at significantly higher transaction sizes than what’s currently possible. Our mission is to break down the barriers that have held back African businesses for decades. About the opportunity Kappa is looking for a Systems Engineer to join our Engineering Team and help scale up our cross-border payments platform in Africa and beyond. Working as part of a small, close-knit team, you’ll have the opportunity to contribute to our stack at all levels, building and maintaining infrastructure, improving our observability footprint, as well as contributing to our backend codebase. At Kappa there is a single engineering team working towards a common goal, building and maintaining our product. Performance, reliability and security are all everyday parts of the job, not a box-ticking exercise. We take observability seriously. At every level of the stack we emit logs, traces and metrics. This allows us to capture baseline performance, tweak performance, and also detect alert-worthy conditions. Crucially, we capture infrastructure, code and business metrics in the same pipeline, allowing correlation across domains. We also make extensive use of LLMs, but take care to use them wisely. Every member of the team is accountable for the code they land, regardless of tooling. The role comes with high degrees of autonomy and agency to build and maintain systems and software. What you'll do Build the infrastructure we require to run our production applications, as well as working on the applications themselves Holistic performance tuning and reliability engineering — treating failure as an inevitability not an edge case Security analysis — including network, OS and code techniques Instrument our stack using a combination of metrics, traces and logs Participate in on-call rotas to support the plant operationally 5+ years of experience in systems engineering or a related discipline (e.g. SRE) Good instincts regarding mechanical sympathy — reasoning from first principles about what goes on close to the metal Strong operational instincts — understanding that building alone isn’t enough Experience with infrastructure as code — declarative provisioning (Terraform or equivalent) Operating systems and Kubernetes principles — user/kernel separation, system calls, etc. Solid host-level networking skills Observability instincts and experience — when to reach for logs, traces, metrics You write golang to a level a senior backend engineer would respect — this is an engineering role, not a scripting role Experience with relational databases is a strong plus Highly competitive salary and equity — top of market. We believe in hiring fewer but better people and paying them more. Health, dental and vision insurance (for you and your dependents) Work remotely from any Africa-friendly timezone (GMT-2h to GMT+4h), periodic team meet-ups across Europe New MacBook Pro and up to $2,000 for home office equipment (headphones, chair, standing desk, etc.) Parental leave / family-friendly culture Unlimited paid time off