Tech Lead- Payments Engineering Job Watu Credit

AI summary

Watu Credit is hiring a Tech Lead for Payments Engineering in Nairobi. This role requires hands-on experience with mobile money APIs (MPESA, Airtel Money), payment reconciliation, and team leadership. You will own payment integrations, API, and operational tools, with 3-5 direct reports.

• Lead a squad owning all payment provider integrations and Payment API.
• Requires hands-on MPESA, Airtel Money integration experience.
• Remote job with management level and 3-5 direct reports.
• Business-critical role impacting revenue directly.

Description

Home » Jobs In Kenya » IT Jobs In Kenya » Tech Lead- Payments Engineering Job Watu Credit Job Title: Tech Lead- Payments Engineering Date Posted: 15/07/2026 Job Type: Remote Job Level: Management Employer: Watu Credit Industry: IT Salary: Open Location: Nairobi Country: Kenya Deadline: 31/07/2026 Summary: IT Jobs, Watu Credit Jobs. Looking for an IT job in Kenya? Watu Credit is hiring a Tech Lead – Payments Engineering skilled in payments system architecture, team leadership, and transactional integration. Job Summary Tech Lead is one of the most important individual roles in the engineering organization. You are the technical authority for your squad – you own the architecture, set the quality bar, govern external partners when applicable, and are the primary escalation point for every engineering decision in your domain. This role carries light people management alongside deep technical ownership. You will have 3-5 direct reports (Backend Engineers, Frontend/Mobile Engineer, QA Engineer). You are responsible for their day-to-day unblocking, their technical growth, and honest feedback on their work. Formal performance reviews and hiring decisions sit with the Head of Engineering – but in practice, your view of each engineer in your squad is the most important input into those decisions. Do not let the word “light” mislead you: if an engineer in your squad is struggling, that is your problem to solve. You are a peer of the Product Owner, not a subordinate. Product owns What. You own How and When. Sprint commitments are signed off by both of you together. If the roadmap is technically unrealistic, your job is to say so early and clearly. Squad: Payments Engineering Quick facts for this squad Governance: No external partner governance – internal only. All payment provider integrations are owned by this squad. Primary tech focus: Java backend · Payment rails · MPESA · Airtel Money · Reconciliation Tools · Payment API Domain responsibilities Own all PSP integrations using the payment rails architecture provided by the Core Platform team, the integration layer for all payment providers (MPESA, Airtel, and others) Own the Payment API consumed by other squads and applications. API versioning, backward compatibility, and security are your responsibility. Own payment operational tools (reconciliation and others) – the technical logic that ensures payment records match across Watu systems and external payment provider records. Lead technical onboarding of new payment providers – integration design, testing strategy, and production readiness are owned by this squad. Ensure that relevant events and metrics are available for observability & monitoring of all PSP integrations This is one of the most business-critical squads. Payments downtime has an immediate revenue impact. Your production reliability standards must reflect that. Domain-specific requirements (in addition to base JD) Hands-on experience integrating mobile money APIs (MPESA, Airtel Money, or equivalent) in production at scale. Understanding of payment reconciliation systems – double-entry accounting logic, discrepancy detection, and financial audit trails. Familiarity with PCI-DSS or equivalent payment security standards, even in an integration or middleware context. Experience designing payment abstraction layers that support multiple providers behind a unified internal API. Fintech or payments engineering background in emerging countries is a strong differentiator. Responsibilities Architecture & technical direction Own the technical architecture for your squad’s domain – system design, API contracts, data models, integration patterns, and the Architectural Decision Records that document why. Enforce the Watu engineering standards within your squad: GitHub for all code, mandatory PR review, coverage gates, OpenAPI documentation, runbooks, and secrets management. Be the squad’s representative to the Platform General Architecture – escalate cross-squad concerns, contribute to shared standards, and ensure your squad’s patterns align with the broader platform direction. Delivery & quality Review and approve all pull requests for your squad. Not as a bottleneck, but as the quality gate. Your name is on everything that ships. Define and maintain the squad’s Definition of Done. Work with the embedded QA engineer to ensure quality is built in, not bolted on. Own the squad’s release process. Nothing ships without your sign-off – including work from external partners where applicable. Drive sprint planning with the Product Owner – translate user stories into technical tasks, surface dependencies, flag risks early. People management (light but real) You have 4-6 direct reports: typically 1–2 Backend Engineers, 1–2 Frontend/Mobile Engineers, and 1-2 QA Engineers. They report to you for day-to-day work; the QA Chapter Lead reports to the Head of Engineering for standards but to you operationally. Unblock engineers actively – pair on hard problems, review designs bef