Scale is a Card Issuing Orchestration platform — building the infrastructure that lets banks, fintechs and non-banks launch and run card programs across African markets, including Zambia, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Nigeria, Côte d'Ivoire, Cameroon and beyond. We recently expanded our Mastercard partnership across sub-Saharan Africa and are scaling quickly. We're a small team building serious infrastructure. We care about our people, their growth, and giving them exposure to work they wouldn't get anywhere else. About the role We're hiring a Backend Lead Engineer to own our backend from spec to build to production to scale, across all our markets. This is a hands-on role. You'll architect and build, not just oversee. You'll work directly with product, ops, and our bank and scheme partners. You'll own production — on call, incidents, postmortems — and you'll lead and grow the engineering team underneath you. Think of it as owning the backend end-to-end for a card issuing orchestration business operating across sub-Saharan Africa. What you'll do Architect, build and run backend systems for card issuing and payments at production volume Own integrations with issuer processors, schemes (Mastercard, Visa), banks and partner platforms Lead engineering practice — hiring, mentoring, code reviews, technical direction Own production quality — on call, incident response, postmortems, reliability Work alongside product and ops to ship across multiple markets Build trusting, authentic relationships with banks, schemes and partners What you’ll have done Built and run payments in production at real volume — card issuing (issuer processor, tokenisation, 3DS, scheme connectivity) is a strong advantage, payments experience is a must Worked with ledgers, reconciliation and settlement Shipped in a startup or early-stage environment, from zero to one Led and hired engineers Owned production systems end-to-end Stack Strong in backend languages — .NET, Java, Rust or Go — and comfortable working with legacy stacks our partners run on. Who you are Strong communicator — internally and externally Able to build trusting, authentic relationships with different people across banks, schemes, partners and internal teams Team player with strong culture values Working arrangements Full-time. Remote if you're not in Johannesburg, relaxed hybrid if you are. #J-18808-Ljbffr