Introduction to 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 4,000 full-time staff in 14 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 SDE-3 Backend will work as part of the Digitization and Automation team to help Sun King design, develop, and implement intelligent, tech-enabled solutions to help solve a large variety of our business problems. We are looking for candidates with an affinity for technology and automation, curiosity about advances in products and strong coding skills for our in-house software development team.

What you will be expected to do:

- Expertise in Java and Python, with hands-on experience in Spring Boot and Django / FastAPI frameworks

- Expertise in AWS, with working experience in Lambda, SQS, S3, EC2 (Linux-based VMs), Load Balancer, and RDS

- Expertise in SQL: query plans, indexing, locking, primary-replica architecture, and schema changes on live tables

- Prior experience working with Redis

- Experience with microservices and distributed, event-driven system design: webhooks, queues, and third-party API integrations

- Observability experience with Grafana and Prometheus/Loki, or an equivalent stack

- Experience running Docker in production (images, Compose, and runtime configs)

- Working experience with message brokers and event-streaming systems such as Kafka or RabbitMQ

- Hands-on experience with AI-assisted coding tools (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor) in day-to-day development

You might be a strong candidate if you have/are:

- Lead incident RCAs, reasoning from what changed against a baseline rather than from snapshots

- Write design docs and architecture maps

- Mentor engineers through code review and pairing

- Own systems after launch, including on-call, runbooks, and cost

- Use AI coding assistants every day, applying the judgement to review, test, and take ownership of the code they help generate

- Design and build applications and systems from wireframes and product requirements documents

- Identify and fix bottlenecks and bugs according to operational requirements

- Design and develop logical and physical data models that meet application requirements

- Build for scalability, performance, service robustness, and cost trade-offs

- Create prototypes and proofs of concept for iterative development

- Take complete, end-to-end ownership of projects and their development cycle