Sr. Backend Developer

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 Senior Software Developer - Backend will work as part of the Digitization and Automation team to support 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 coherent 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 software and communication tools) with external services.
• Coordinate with Product Manager, development team, & business analysts.

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

• A minimum of 4 years of experience.
• Deep knowledge of OOPS concepts and programming skills in Core Java, Spring Framework.
• Experience in web service development and integration (SOAP, REST, JSON, XML).
• Should be very strong in problem solving, data structures, and algorithms.
• Strong experience in SQL.
• Experience in the AWS suite (Ec2, RDS, Lambda, API Gateway).
• Experience in scripting languages like Python.
• Experience in Microservice Architecture.
• Prior managing/mentoring experience.
• Knowledge of best software engineering practices for all stages of the software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, testing, and deployment. 

Good to have:

• Knowledge on messaging systems RabbitMQ, Kafka.
• 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.

Senior Backend Developer /Backend Developer

Hiring for the position of Backend Developer responsible for managing back-end services and the interchange of data between the server and the users.

Your primary focus will be the development of all server side logic, definition and maintenance of the central database, and ensuring high performance and responsiveness to requests from the front-end.

Role

●        Create and consume restful APIs

●        Design, develop, and maintain internal and external applications

●        Build efficient, testable, and reusable modules

●        Write high quality, structured application/interface code and documentation

●        Identify solutions through research and collaboration that resolves the root of problems as they arise

●        Define functional and technical requirements for application software to develop skills and knowledge

●        Troubleshoot, test and maintain the core product software and databases to ensure strong optimization and functionality

●        Contribute in all phases of the development lifecycle

Requirement

∙ Proficient in Node.JS

∙ 2+ years’ experience designing, querying, and updating databases in MySQL/nosql 

∙ Passion for best design and coding practices and a desire to develop new bold ideas

∙ Good to have knowledge of AWS, Redis, ElasticSearch

Education: Min. Graduate in related discipline

Work experience: 2 years relevant experience

Title: 

Node Js Developer

Ideal candidates will have 1-3 years of experience  in Node JS and AWS.

Responsibilities: 

• Translate application storyboards and use cases into functional applications
• Design, build and maintain efficient, reusable, and reliable Node JS code
• Ensure the best possible performance, quality, and responsiveness of applications
• Identify bottlenecks and bugs, and devise solutions to these problems, Help maintain code quality, organization, and automation.
• Triage and resolve complex + systemic issues reported on existing production systems
• Communicate effectively with  product owners, and development team members to facilitate understanding of deliverables, estimates, and prioritization
• Contribute to production deployments, including documentation of technical specifications and release notes
• Designs and develops quality software that conforms to department standards and code style
• Writing reusable, testable, and efficient code, create automated test cases following TDD/BDD best practices
• Maintain and enhance existing NodeJS codebase.
• Organize an agile development process that facilitates collaboration, provides transparency, empowers the project team, surfaces and resolves impediments,delivers high-quality software, focuses on delivering business value, and continuously looks to improve.
• Take on a championship role in on-time, high-quality delivery of products through the entire application lifecycle.

What will you work on?

• Architecting clever technical solutions
• Hands-on development using NodeJS and other Javascript frameworks
• Recommend technical frameworks and tech stacks
• Define REST, or GraphQL APIs, document APIs and develop the API handlers
• Design and develop with serverless and scalable systems
• Integrate with 3rd party systems
• Create architectural solution prototypes
• Lead the team, code reviews, and problem-solving

What Makes You A Great Fit?

• 1+ years of software experience with Node JS, Javascript frameworks related to webstack
• Understanding the nature of asynchronous programming and its quirks and workarounds
• Experience with use of serverless functions from AWS
• Experience with architecture of technology systems having hands-on expertise in backend and cloud systems ( AWS, GCP)
• Expertise with NoSQL databases (Mongo, ElasticSearch, Redis) including design of schemas and development for these databases
• Knowledge of DevOps practices and CI/CD pipelines
• Experience in Microservice architecture and development including REST-based APIs.
• Highly collaborative with an affinity for solving complex problems through dialogue with team members.
• Curious, always seeking the whys and hows in order to gain a deeper and more complete understanding of the business and technology.
• Comfortable with ambiguity can begin to explore and solve complex problems when the problem and solution are not well-defined.
• Ability to multitask, switching between various projects/tasks of different natures and complexity with ease
• Knowledge of git based workflows such as gitflow
• Experience with Python in addition to the core knowledge of Node JS is a plus
• Chatbot, Machine Learning, Data Science/Big Data experience will be a plus
• Excellent communication skills, verbal and written

Competencies & Behavior

• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills
• Implement design thinking for different strategieS
• Attention to detail and the ability to work to tight deadlines
• Strong experience in cloud server infrastructure
• Ability to work on complex applications, perform product analysis, development tasks of complex web
• Jumping on a call with clients to understand the requirement and profile them the right solution, helping formulate an effective solution and turning it into a working application
• Conducting website performance and unit tests
• Heavy involvement in the requirements gathering, development and operational stages of new projects
• Troubleshoot and debug related application defects with existing and new applications
• Work collaboratively with the team members and train them as and when required.

*Performs analysis of functional and business requirements

*Applies in-depth or broad technical knowledge to maintain data engineering functions performs solution design.

*Applies the company, open source, and 3rd party technologies to highly complex infrastructure and software solutions.

*Introduce new product features and enhance the platform

*Ability to translate business reporting requirements into a production report.

• 3 - 6 Years of Experience in Product Development - Experience in Java (8 or 11+), Spring (4+), Spring Boot (2.4+) is a must.
• Understands requirements well and comes up with an efficient design
• Develops complex, well-backed and bug-free products.
• Estimates accurately.
• Takes well-reasoned tech decisions keeping in mind goals and trade-offs
• Become a go-to person in more than one area.
• Provide technical mentoring to team
• Communicates clearly, gets clarifications, and establishes expectations for all parties
• Helps establish SDLC best practices and high standards of code quality
• Demonstrates excellent problem solving & debugging skills
• Proactively identifies and resolves issues in requirements, design, and code

Ideal Candidate Profile :

• Solid experience in Java, Spring Boot, hibernate is a must.
• Solid experience in Java Multithreading, Streams, and Lambda Functions is a must.
• Solid understanding of Apache Products.
• Should have experience in cloud computing (AWS is desired).
• Has an ability to quickly learn and contribute in multiple codebases
• Overcomes roadblocks and requires minimal oversight
• Takes initiatives to fix issues/tech debts before assigned to him/her
• Able to deep dive into the codebase and advise QA of possible regression impact
• Communicates tech decisions through design docs and tech talks
• Has delivered projects with end-to-end accountability
• Keeps track of industry trends and introduces the right tech/tools for a given job
• Excellent understanding of software engineering practices, design patterns, data structures, algorithms
• Experience in product driven organization

Roles/Responsibilities

• Own the coding/design of a sub-module
• Review the requirements and provide simple solutions  
• Design the sub-module working with the tech-lead
• Hands-on code the critical parts of the module
• Ensure coding standards, proper design patterns, writing test cases and project mgmt processes are followed
• Mentor the junior programmers
• Peer and junior programmers code review
• Work independently and proactively to deliver production-ready code with minimal guidance

Jobs Skills required

• Strong experience in developing either backend or front end systems
• Backend Exp: RoR, NodeJS, Java, Go, MySQL, Mongo
• Ability to work in a team structure and deliver projects
• Very strong analytical and problem solving skills in super changing environment
• Understanding of algorithms and data structures