Sun King

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.

About the role:

We are looking for a Backend Engineer to join a mature, scaled product platform that is already serving business-critical workflows. This role focuses on enhancing existing backend systems, improving reliability, performance, and scalability, and building new features on top of a well-established architecture.

The ideal candidate is strong at writing production-quality code, debugging complex distributed systems, and knowledgeable about how design decisions impact scalability, availability, and long-term maintainability. You will work closely with cross-functional teams to ensure the platform continues to perform reliably at scale while evolving with business needs.

What you will be expected to do:

• Develop, enhance, and maintain backend services for existing user, inventory, pricing, order, and payment management systems running at scale.
• Write clean, efficient, and highly reliable code using Java 8 and above and Spring Boot 2.7 and above.
• Own and improve production systems with a strong focus on performance, scalability, availability, and fault tolerance.
• Debug and resolve complex production issues involving services, databases, caches, and messaging systems.
• Contribute to low-level design (LLD) and actively participate in high-level architecture (HLD) discussions for new features and system improvements.
• Work with event-driven and asynchronous architectures, ensuring correctness and reliability of data flows.
• Optimize database schemas, queries, indexing strategies, and caching layers for high-throughput workloads.
• Partner with DevOps, QA, and Product teams to support smooth 24×7 production operations.
• Participate in code reviews, design reviews, and incident post-mortems to continuously improve system quality.
• Take end-to-end ownership of backend components, from design and implementation to deployment and production support.

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

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or equivalent experience.
• 2+ years of experience building and maintaining backend systems in production environments.
• Strong proficiency in Java with hands-on experience in Spring Boot–based microservices.
• Solid knowledge of data structures, algorithms, and backend problem solving.
• Strong experience with PostgreSQL or other relational databases in high-scale systems.
• Experience building and consuming RESTful APIs and working with asynchronous systems.
• Strong debugging and troubleshooting skills in live production systems.
• Good understanding of software engineering best practices, including testing, code reviews, CI/CD, and release management.
• Clear communication skills and the ability to partner effectively within a team.
• Hands-on experience with Kafka or similar messaging/event-streaming platforms.
• Exposure to distributed systems, microservices architecture, and scaling strategies.

Good to have:

• Experience using Redis, Elasticsearch, and MongoDB in production systems.
• Experience with monitoring, logging, and observability tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK).
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure and containerized environments (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Experience participating in on-call rotations and handling production incidents.

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, providing affordable solar solutions to the 1.8 billion people without reliable access to electricity. By combining product design, fintech, and field operations, Sun King has connected over 20 million homes to solar power across Africa and Asia, adding more than 200,000 new homes each month. Through ‘pay-as-you-go’ financing, customers make small payments to eventually own their solar systems, saving money and reducing reliance on harmful energy sources like kerosene.

Sun King employs 2,800 staff across 12 countries, with expertise in product design, data science, logistics, customer service, and more. The company is expanding its product range to include clean cooking, electric mobility, and entertainment solutions, all while supporting a diverse workforce — with women making up 44% of the team.

About the role:

The role involves designing, executing, and maintaining robust functional, regression, and integration testing to ensure product quality and reliability, along with thorough defect tracking, analysis, and resolution. The individual will develop and maintain UI and API automation frameworks to improve test coverage, minimize manual effort, and enhance release efficiency. Close collaboration with development teams is expected to reproduce issues, validate fixes, and ensure high-quality releases. The role also includes integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines, supporting production issue analysis, and verifying hotfixes in live environments. Additionally, the candidate will actively participate in requirement and design reviews to ensure testability and clarity, maintain comprehensive QA documentation, and continuously improve testing frameworks, tools, and overall QA processes.

What you will be expected to do:

• Design, execute, and maintain test cases, test plans, and test scripts for functional, regression, and integration testing.
• Identify software defects, document them clearly, and track them through to closure.
• Analyze bugs and provide detailed insights to help developers understand root causes.
• Partner closely with the development team to reproduce issues, validate fixes, and ensure overall product quality.
• Develop, maintain, and improve automated test suites (API/UI) to enhance test coverage, reduce manual effort, and improve release confidence.
• Work with CI/CD pipelines to integrate automated tests into the deployment workflow.
• Validate production issues, support troubleshooting, and verify hotfixes in real-time environments.
• Recommend improvements in product performance, usability, and reliability based on test findings.
• Participate in requirement and design reviews to ensure clarity, completeness, and testability.
• Benchmark against competitor products and suggest enhancements based on industry trends.
• Maintain detailed test documentation, including test results, defect logs, and release readiness assessments.
• Continuously improve QA processes, automation frameworks, and testing methodologies.

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

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field.
• 2+ years of hands-on experience in software testing (manual + exposure to automation).
• Strong understanding of QA methodologies, testing types, and best practices.
• Experience in designing and executing test cases, test plans, and regression suites.
• Exposure to automation tools/frameworks such as Selenium, Playwright, Cypress, TestNG, JUnit, or similar.
• Basic programming or scripting knowledge (Java/Python preferred).
• Good understanding of SQL for backend and data validation testing.
• Familiarity with API testing tools such as Postman or RestAssured.
• Experience with defect tracking and test management tools (Jira, TestRail, etc.).
• Strong analytical and debugging skills with the ability to identify root causes.
• Ability to work effectively in Agile/Scrum environments and partner with developers, product, and DevOps teams.
• Strong ownership mindset — having contributed to high-quality, near bug-free releases.

Good to have:

• Exceptional attention to detail and a strong focus on product quality.
• Experience with performance, load, or security testing (JMeter, Gatling, OWASP tools, etc.).
• Exposure to advanced automation frameworks or building automation scripts from scratch.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and integrating automated tests.
• Experience working with observability tools like Grafana, Kibana, and Prometheus for production verification.
• Good understanding of microservices, distributed systems, or cloud platforms.

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.