Senior Backend Engineer (Java / Architecture)
Watu · Technology Organisation · Reports to Tech Lead
Location

Europe

Reports to

Tech Lead of assigned squad

Primary language

Java (Spring Boot) - architecture depth and system design expected, not Java-only focus

Seniority

Senior - 5+ years

About Watu
Watu is a fintech company operating across Africa and Latin America, providing device financing and financial services to customers historically excluded from the formal financial system. We finance motorcycles, smartphones and other productive assets through a technology-first, data-driven approach - enabling customers to own income-generating assets and build credit histories.
Our platform supports millions of customer journeys across Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Ivory Coast, Ghana, and beyond, with continued expansion into LATAM.
The Role
Senior Backend Engineer at Watu means owning a domain end-to-end inside your squad - and influencing how that domain evolves. You write code, but you also shape the system.



You bring architectural opinions that the Tech Lead can rely on, you raise the quality bar for the engineers around you, and you take full responsibility for the reliability and maintainability of what you build.
We use Java as our primary backend language, but we do not hire Java developers who only think about Java. We hire engineers who happen to use Java. The difference matters: we want people who can reason about distributed systems, design clean APIs, think about failure modes before they happen, and care about the downstream consumer of their code as much as the implementation.
You will be embedded in a squad of 4–6 people. Your Tech Lead is your primary technical counterpart and reviewer, but at the senior level the expectation is that you operate with significant autonomy. You are not waiting to be told what to build or how to solve a problem - you bring a point of view, surface design decisions proactively, and contribute to the direction of your domai

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