Sun King

About the role:

The SDE 2 - 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 automations, curiosity towards advancement in products, and strong coding skills for our in-house software development team.

What you will be expected to do:

• Design and build applications/systems based on wireframes and product requirements documents
• Design and develop conceptual and physical data models to meet application requirements. 
• Identify and correct bottlenecks/bugs according to operational requirements
• Focus on scalability, performance, service robustness, and cost trade-offs.
• Create prototypes and proof-of-concepts for iterative development.
• Take complete ownership of projects (end to end) and their development cycle
• Mentoring and guiding team members
• Unit test code for robustness, including edge cases, usability and general reliability
• Integrate existing tools and business systems (in-house tools or business tools like Ticketing softwares, communication tools) with external services
• Coordinate with the Product Manager, development team & business analysts

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

• Development experience: 3 – 5 years
• Should be very strong in problem-solving, data structures, and algorithms.
• Deep knowledge of OOPS concepts and programming skills in Core Java and Spring Boot Framework
• Strong Experience in SQL
• Experience in web service development and integration (SOAP, REST, JSON, XML)
• Understanding of code versioning tools (e.g., git)
• Experience in Agile/Scrum development process and tools
• Experience in Microservice architecture
• Hands-on experience in AWS RDS, EC2, S3 and deployments

Good to have:

• Knowledge on messaging systems RabbitMQ, Kafka.
• Knowledge of Python
• Container-based application deployment (Docker or equivalent)
• Willing to learn new technologies and implement them in products

What Sun King offers:

• Professional growth in a dynamic, rapidly expanding, high-social-impact industry
• An open-minded, collaborative culture made up of enthusiastic colleagues who are driven by the challenge of innovation towards profound impact on people and the planet.
• A truly multicultural experience: you will have the chance to work with and learn from people from different geographies, nationalities, and backgrounds.
• Structured, tailored learning and development programs that help you become a better leader, manager, and professional through the Sun King Center for Leadership.

About Sun King

Sun King is a leading off-grid solar energy company providing affordable, reliable electricity to 1.8 billion people without grid access. Operating across Africa and Asia, Sun King has connected over 20 million homes, adding 200,000 homes monthly.

Through a ‘pay-as-you-go’ model, customers make small daily payments (as low as $0.11) via mobile money or cash, eventually owning their solar equipment and saving on costly kerosene or diesel. To date, Sun King products have saved customers over $4 billion.

With 28,000 field agents and embedded electronics that regulate usage based on payments, Sun King ensures seamless energy access. Its products range from home lighting and phone charging systems to solar inverters capable of powering high-energy appliances.

Sun King is expanding into clean cooking, electric mobility, and entertainment while serving a wide range of income segments.

The company employs 2,800 staff across 12 countries, with women representing 44% of the workforce, and expertise spanning product design, data science, logistics, sales, software, and operations.

About Sun King

Sun King is the world’s leading off-grid solar energy company, delivering energy access to 1.8 billion people without reliable grid connections through innovative product design, fintech solutions, and field operations.

Key highlights:

• Connected over 20 million homes to solar power across Africa and Asia, adding 200,000 homes monthly.
• Affordable ‘pay-as-you-go’ financing model; after 1-2 years, customers own their solar equipment.
• Saved customers over $4 billion to date.
• Collect 650,000 daily payments via 28,000 field agents using mobile money systems.
• Products range from home lighting to high-energy appliances, with expansion into clean cooking, electric mobility, and entertainment.

With 2,800 staff across 12 countries, our team includes experts in various fields, all passionate about serving off-grid communities.

Diversity Commitment:

44% of our workforce are women, reflecting our commitment to gender diversity.

About the role:

Sun King is looking for a self-driven Infrastructure engineer, who is comfortable working in a fast-paced startup environment and balancing the needs of multiple development teams and systems. You will work on improving our current IAC, observability stack, and incident response processes. You will work with the data science, analytics, and engineering teams to build optimized CI/CD pipelines, scalable AWS infrastructure, and Kubernetes deployments.

What you would be expected to do:

• Work with engineering, automation, and data teams to work on various infrastructure requirements.
• Designing modular and efficient GitOps CI/CD pipelines, agnostic to the underlying platform.
• Managing AWS services for multiple teams.
• Managing custom data store deployments like sharded MongoDB clusters, Elasticsearch clusters, and upcoming services.
• Deployment and management of Kubernetes resources.
• Deployment and management of custom metrics exporters, trace data, custom application metrics, and designing dashboards, querying metrics from multiple resources, as an end-to-end observability stack solution.
• Set up incident response services and design effective processes.
• Deployment and management of critical platform services like OPA and Keycloak for IAM.
• Advocate best practices for high availability and scalability when designing AWS infrastructure, observability dashboards, implementing IAC, deploying to Kubernetes, and designing GitOps CI/CD pipelines.

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

• Hands-on experience with Docker or any other container runtime environment and Linux with the ability to perform basic administrative tasks.
• Experience working with web servers (nginx, apache) and cloud providers (preferably AWS).
• Hands-on scripting and automation experience (Python, Bash), experience debugging and troubleshooting Linux environments and cloud-native deployments.
• Experience building CI/CD pipelines, with familiarity with monitoring & alerting systems (Grafana, Prometheus, and exporters).
• Knowledge of web architecture, distributed systems, and single points of failure.
• Familiarity with cloud-native deployments and concepts like high availability, scalability, and bottleneck.
• Good networking fundamentals — SSH, DNS, TCP/IP, HTTP, SSL, load balancing, reverse proxies, and firewalls.

Good to have:

• Experience with backend development and setting up databases and performance tuning using parameter groups.
• Working experience in Kubernetes cluster administration and Kubernetes deployments.
• Experience working alongside sec ops engineers.
• Basic knowledge of Envoy, service mesh (Istio), and SRE concepts like distributed tracing.
• Setup and usage of open telemetry, central logging, and monitoring systems.

What Sun King offers:

• Professional growth in a dynamic, rapidly expanding, high-social-impact industry.
• An open-minded, collaborative culture made up of enthusiastic colleagues who are driven by the challenge of innovation towards profound impact on people and the planet.
• A truly multicultural experience: you will have the chance to work with and learn from people from different geographies, nationalities, and backgrounds.
• Structured, tailored learning and development programs that help you become a better leader, manager, and professional through the Sun King Center for Leadership.