Head of Engineering, Payment Gateway

Who we are

Moniepoint Inc. is Africa’s all-in-one financial platform, helping 20 million businesses and individuals access seamless payments, banking, credit, cross-border, and business management tools each month.

As Nigeria’s largest merchant acquirer, we power most of the country’s point-of-sale (POS) transactions. Through our subsidiaries, Moniepoint Inc. processes over $250 billion in digital payment transaction value annually.

Why South Africa

South Africa has one of the strongest engineering communities anywhere in the world, and we are deliberately growing our technology organisation in the country. We already have several team members based here. The work is fully remote, and the mission we are working on is a good deal closer to home than it is for our teams elsewhere.

So, now we are looking for our Head of Engineering, Payment Gateway to join us in South Africa.

About the role

Monnify is Moniepoint's online payment acceptance platform: the gateway layer connecting merchants to card networks, banks and payment aggregators, and the tools that let businesses and developers accept and send money digitally. The division owns transaction reliability, routing and throughput at scale, together with the developer experience that sits on top of it - APIs, SDKs, documentation and ease of integration. Built first for Nigerian businesses and developers, the platform is now scaling internationally and moving towards multi-currency, multi-market support.

The Head of Engineering owns the technical direction and architecture of that platform, ensuring scalability, security and developer experience for both technical and non-technical users. The role involves leading multiple engineering teams through their managers, setting strategic architecture, and ensuring platform reliability, security and scalability across Payment In, Payout, Commerce Tools and developer-facing features. As the Head of Engineering, Payment Gateway, your responsibilities will include:

• Own the full technical strategy, architecture and roadmap for the Monnify platform across all capability areas.
• Lead multiple engineering teams through engineering managers, setting quality standards and building organisational capability.
• Own the developer experience end-to-end, including APIs, documentation, SDKs and integration ease.
• Drive platform evolution towards multi-currency and international scalability.
• Ensure platform reliability, scalability and security within a regulated environment.
• Partner with product, commercial and operations teams to align technical investments with business goals.
• Hire, mentor and develop engineering managers and senior engineers to support growth.

Who You Are

• Over 10 years of software engineering experience, with at least 5 years in engineering leadership roles.
• 5+ years of hands-on, production-level experience writing and shipping Java code as a practising engineer. This means years spent writing Java yourself, not only years spent overseeing teams who write it.
• At least 5 years of experience managing managers - leading an engineering organisation through other engineering leaders, rather than running a single team.
• Experience in payments, fintech or financial services products, with a working understanding of payment flows and compliance.
• Deep knowledge of API-first products, developer platforms and API integration.
• Proven leadership of multiple engineering teams via managers in a scaling organisation.
• Strong backend engineering skills in high-throughput, distributed transactional systems.
• Experience building or operating a payment gateway or multi-currency payment platform is a strong plus.

Cultural Alignment

As well, we assess every candidate across eight dimensions that define how great leaders operate at Moniepoint. We look for evidence of all eight throughout the process, not just in a single conversation.

• Customer Obsession: Build deep empathy for users. Solve problems intuitively, and fix root causes, not just tickets.
• Craft: Master the fundamentals. Reason from first principles, make trade-offs explicit, and raise the bar on quality.
• Systemisation: Turn repeating decisions into scalable mechanisms. Reduce cognitive load and raise engineering quality.
• Urgency: Move with disciplined speed. Act autonomously within scope, remove friction, and escalate risks early.
• Ownership: Treat the platform as your own. Take initiative across boundaries and follow through without reminders.
• No Ego: Put the mission first. Share credit, welcome debate, and never protect status over team outcomes.
• Candour: Surface uncomfortable truths and risks early. Intelligent failure is welcome; concealment is not.
• Integrity: Stay truthful and ethically consistent. Refuse toxic behavior. Performance without integrity is unacceptable.

What To Expect In The Hiring Process

• A preliminary phone call with the recruiter
• A Panel interview session with two of our VPs of Engineering
• A Technical Assessment with our Group CTO / Co-founder
• A Behavioral and technical interview with our Group CEO / Founder
• Technical Workshop with our Group CTO / Co-founder

Some of the technologies you’ll get to work with

• Java (latest versions)
• Spring and Spring Boot
• Docker and Kubernetes
• PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, Elastic search
• Microservices architecture on AWS

What we can offer you

• Own the payments infrastructure that thousands of businesses and developers build on, at a company processing hundreds of billions of dollars in transaction volume annually.
• Work in a fast-paced, technically demanding environment at the core of how money moves in high-growth markets.
• Be part of a mission-driven company expanding access to financial services for millions of businesses and individuals.

Moniepoint is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees and candidates.