Backend Engineer (Intern / Early Contributor)

About the Role

As a Backend Engineer at Cornerstone Digital Payments, you’ll help design, build, and scale the core systems that keep money moving securely across Africa. From building APIs to optimizing performance, your work will directly power the experience of thousands of users every day.

You’ll collaborate closely with other engineers, designers, and product thinkers in a fast-moving, supportive team that values initiative, creativity, and problem-solving.

What You’ll Do

• Build and maintain reliable APIs and backend services
• Ensure performance, security, and scalability of our systems
• Collaborate with frontend and product teams to launch new features
• Write clean, maintainable, and testable code
• Participate in discussions around architecture, design, and deployment
• Help us improve our tools, workflows, and engineering culture
• Investigate and fix bugs quickly to keep our systems running smoothly

You’ll Thrive Here If You

• Have at least 1 year of experience in backend development
• Know your way around Node.js, Python, Go, or a similar language
• Understand databases (SQL or NoSQL) and API design
• Care about clean code, performance, and scalability
• Have experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or similar)
• Enjoy learning new technologies and working in a startup environment
• Are proactive and take ownership of your work

Bonus Points

• Experience in fintech or payments
• Knowledge of Docker or Kubernetes
• Interest in system design and scalability
• Experience with CI/CD or DevOps tools
• Contributions to open-source projects