Software Engineer – Backend at Cowrywise, Lagos

To be the dominant, digital-first wealth and asset management partner for the underserved African middle class and fast-growing African businesses. We empower over 3 million customers to build a savings and investment culture across different asset classes. Our customer base continues to expand and we are committed to ensuring that every interaction with our platform provides the best experience possible.

The role

We need a backend engineer who can own features end-to-end, from database schema to production. You’ll work on our core financial platform: portfolios, transactions, third-party integrations, and the systems that keep everything running reliably.

This role is highly collaborative. You’ll work closely with product and design to figure out what we’re building, then take ownership of how it gets built and shipped.

Your code handles real money, so correctness matters. We also ship frequently, so speed matters too. The best candidates know how to balance both.

What you’ll do

Features

• Build backend features for savings products, portfolios, stock investments
• Own the whole thing: database design, business logic, APIs, tests, deployment, monitoring
• Write code that someone else can read and maintain a year from now
• Work with frontend/mobile to define API contracts

Systems

• Build integrations with payment gateways (Paystack, Monnify, etc), fund managers, and KYC providers
• Design systems that handle money correctly. Idempotency, consistency, audit trails. Non-negotiable.
• Debug production issues and be on call for systems you build

Performance

• Optimize database queries, design schemas, and make things fast
• PostgreSQL and Redis for the data layer
• Celery for background jobs

Code quality

• Review code and get your code reviewed
• Write tests that actually catch bugs
• Help onboard new engineers

What we’re looking for

Required

• 5+ years building production backend systems
• Our primary language is Python (Django/FastAPI), but proficiency in Golang and JavaScript (and TypeScript) is also important
• PostgreSQL, MYSQL: schema design, query optimization, transactions
• Event-driven architectures, message queues (SQS, RabbitMQ, Kafka)
• REST APIs: clean contracts, versioning, error handling
• AWS basics (EC2, RDS, S3, SQS, Lambda)
• Background job processing (Celery or similar)
• Can debug through logs, metrics, and code
• Git, CI/CD, modern workflows
• Can explain technical concepts to non-technical people

Nice to have

• Fintech, payments, or financial services experience
• Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, ECS
• Monitoring tools (New Relic, Sentry, CloudWatch)
• Typescript and Golang Experience

The people who succeed on this team

• Take ownership without being asked
• Know when to optimize and when to ship
• Write code for humans
• Adapt when requirements change
• Give and receive feedback well
• Care about users, not just code
• Make the people around them better