About Sun King :

Sun King is the world's leading off-grid solar energy company, combining cutting-edge product design, fintech, and field operations to deliver energy access for the 1.8 billion people who live without an affordable and reliable electric-grid connection. Sun King has connected more than 20 million homes to solar power across Africa and Asia, adding over 200,000 homes each month.

Sun King makes solar products affordable to low-income households and businesses via 'pay-as-you-go' purchase financing. Sun King installs solar after customers pay a small deposit. Customers then make small, manageable payments of as little as US $0.11 a day via mobile money or cash.

Instead of paying for expensive, polluting, and health-damaging kerosene for lighting or diesel for power, customers unlock savings through accessing solar power and after one to two years of payments, customers own their solar equipment outright. To date, our Sun King solar products have saved customers more than $4 billion cumulatively. Sun King collects payments digitally through mobile money systems and its 28,000 field agents - over 650,000 payments each day. Embedded electronics inside each Sun King device regulate usage based on payments, similar to the operation of a pre-paid mobile or electricity meter.

From cost-effective solar systems that provide home lighting and phone charging to robust solar inverters that can power high-energy appliances such as laptops, computers, refrigerators, and more, effectively acting as a full stand-in for grid power, Sun King's products cater to a wide range of income segments and energy needs. Leveraging its proven distribution network and brand, Sun King is expanding its range of products and services to encompass clean cooking, electric mobility, entertainment, and more, aiming to address the needs of our underserved customers.

Sun King employs 4000 full-time staff in 12 countries, with specialities spanning product design, data science, logistics, customer service, sales, software, operations, and more - all with a passion to serve off-grid families.

Sun King is committed to gender diversity in the workplace. Women represent 44% of Sun King's workforce.

About the role :

The Senior Software Engineer - Backend will join the Digitization and Automation team to design, develop, and implement scalable technology solutions that solve a wide variety of business problems across the organization.

This role is primarily focused on backend engineering, requiring strong software engineering fundamentals, system design expertise, and complete ownership of business-critical applications. Additionally, this position plays a key role in identifying, designing, and building AI-powered solutions to improve operational efficiency, automation, decision-making, and developer productivity across the organization.

The ideal candidate combines strong backend engineering experience with practical experience building AI-powered applications, agents, copilots, retrieval systems, and workflow automations. This professional should be proficient in evaluating where AI adds business value, designing appropriate system architectures, and mentoring other engineers on AI-related engineering practices.

Total Experience : 3-9 years

Core Backend Engineering :

- Strong experience in designing and developing scalable REST-based microservices and APIs using Java (Spring Boot) and Python.

- Strong experience with SQL, database design, and query optimization. Experience working with AWS services such as EC2, RDS, and Lambda.

Applied AI & Automation :

- Hands-on experience building AI-powered applications or workflows in production environments.

- Practical understanding of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures and their application to business problems.

- Experience designing and building AI agents, copilots, workflow assistants, or intelligent automation systems.

- Understanding of tool-calling, context management, prompt design, structured outputs, and hallucination mitigation techniques when integrating LLMs with business systems, APIs, and databases.

- Ability to design end-to-end AI-powered solutions that effectively combine deterministic systems with LLM-driven reasoning.

Leadership & Collaboration :

- Prior experience mentoring engineers and leading technical initiatives.

Key Responsibilities :

Backend Engineering :

- Design, build, and integrate scalable and reliable backend systems based on business and product requirements.

- Identify and resolve bottlenecks, bugs, and operational issues.

- Drive improvements in scalability, performance, reliability, observability, and cost optimization.

- Create prototypes and proof-of-concepts (POCs) for new products, features, and AI initiatives.

- Take complete ownership of projects from design through deployment and production support.

- Collaborate closely with Product Managers, Business Analysts, QA teams, and other engineering teams.

AI Strategy & Architecture :

- Lead the establishment and evolution of AI Engineering capabilities, including architecture, tooling, development standards, and best practices.

- Define and drive the AI technology stack, ensuring scalable, secure, reliable, and cost-effective adoption of AI across engineering and business workflows.

- Architect systems that combine LLMs, retrieval systems, business logic, databases, APIs, and operational tooling.

- Evaluate emerging AI technologies, frameworks, and models, providing technical direction on their adoption and integration within the organization.

- Mentor and guide engineers on backend architecture, AI system design, and implementation best practices to foster AI expertise across the team.

Preferred Qualifications (Good to Have) :

- Experience with messaging systems such as RabbitMQ, Kafka, or Amazon SQS.

- Experience with containerized deployments using Docker and Kubernetes.

- Experience building retrieval systems, semantic search, or knowledge assistants.

- Familiarity with agent frameworks and orchestration platforms.

- Experience integrating AI systems with enterprise applications, operational tooling, or internal platforms.

- Experience working with vector databases and embeddings.

- Experience building internal developer productivity or operational automation tools.

- Exposure to Model Context Protocol (MCP) or similar tool integration patterns.

- A strong interest in emerging technologies and a commitment to continuous learning and experimentation.