KingMakers

Principal Software Engineer

KingMakers  •  Cape Town, ZA (Hybrid)  •  4 months ago
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Job Description

About Us

At KingMakers, we build technology that powers sports and gaming experiences for millions of users across Africa.

Since 2018, we’ve grown into one of the most relevant entertainment and betting groups in the region, known for our strong in-house tech culture and relentless focus on scalability, performance, and reliability.

We believe great engineering is about clarity, impact, and ownership, not buzzwords. Our teams collaborate across several countries to solve complex technical challenges that directly affect our users and the business.

We move fast, ship often, and stay pragmatic. If you enjoy building things that scale and solving problems that matter, you’ll feel at home here.

About The Role

We’re looking for a Principal Backend Engineer to take a key role in shaping the architecture and technical direction of our platform.

You’ll design systems that handle millions of transactions, improve performance across services, and ensure our technology can scale safely and efficiently as the business grows.

You’ll act as a technical leader and hands-on architect, guiding teams, raising the quality bar, and helping us make smart, sustainable engineering decisions.

What You’ll Be Doing

  • Architect the future: design, implement, and evolve distributed systems that handle high throughput and millions of concurrent transactions.
  • Provide technical leadership act as a go-to expert for backend and infrastructure topics, mentoring teams and raising the overall engineering bar.
  • Optimize performance: identify bottlenecks and design scalable solutions that improve availability, latency, and cost efficiency.
  • Drive reliability establish solid standards for monitoring, alerting, and incident management, ensuring our systems are observable and resilient.
  • Collaborate across teams: partner with product and business leaders to translate ideas into clear technical strategies and execution plans.
  • Improve continuously challenge existing solutions, propose better patterns, and keep us aligned with modern practices in distributed systems and DevOps.
  • Lead by example: write clean, maintainable code; review peers’ work; and ensure consistent engineering quality across services.
  • Be part of on-call rotations for critical systems, focusing on root-cause prevention, not firefighting.

Tech Stack

You’ll work with a modern, cloud-native environment including:

  • Languages & Frameworks: C#, .NET 8, .NET Core
  • Messaging & Streaming: Kafka, RabbitMQ, Azure Service Bus
  • Databases: SQL Server, MongoDB, CosmosDB, Redis
  • Infrastructure & Orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes (AKS), Azure Cloud
  • Monitoring & Observability: Grafana, Kibana, Application Insights

Experience with this exact stack is not mandatory, but deep technical curiosity, sound design principles, and adaptability are.

Requirements

We’re looking for someone who thrives in complexity and is driven by the pursuit of excellence. To succeed in this role, you’ll need:

  • 10+ years of engineering leadership, with a proven track record of delivering large-scale, distributed systems.
  • Expertise in some cloud architectures (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud), DevOps practices (CI/CD), Microservices (AKS), Kafka/RabbitMQ streams and programming languages (C#, or others).
  • Demonstrated ability to quickly address production incidents and implement preventive measures to avoid recurrence.
  • Proven capability to maintain product quality through unit testing and end-to-end testing processes.
  • The ability to foresee future challenges, craft innovative solutions, and implement strategies that drive meaningful impact.
  • Exceptional communication skills to work effectively across teams and influence stakeholders at all levels.
  • While iGaming experience is a plus, what matters most is your ability to solve real-world problems with creativity and precision.

Benefits

Perks

  • Health Support: A monthly allowance to invest in your health and wellbeing
  • Comprehensive Insurance: Extra protection and peace of mind for you and your loved ones
  • Future Planning: Employer contributions towards your long-term financial security
  • Performance Bonus: Discretionary rewards that celebrate your impact
  • Convenience at Work: Free reserved parking at the office
  • Hybrid Work: A flexible arrangement with 2 days in the office and 3 days remote each week
KingMakers

About KingMakers

KingMakers is the home where Africa plays.

We are the platform behind two of Africa’s most exciting digital brands: BetKing in Nigeria and SuperSportBet in South Africa.

We build intuitive, high-performing platforms that bring fans closer to the sports they love — making every moment of interaction more dynamic, connected, and rewarding.

At our core, we focus on what matters: creating bold, seamless experiences that put our customers first and celebrate the passion of millions across the continent.

We’re a homegrown African tech company — scaling with ambition, building with purpose, and creating opportunity at every step: for our users, for our teams, and for the communities we serve.

Industry
Arts & Entertainment
Company Size
501-1,000 employees
Headquarters
London, GB
Year Founded
2018
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