Principal Backend Engineer (.NET / C#) at 247Bet

Role Description

• This is a full-time hybrid role for a Principal Backend Engineer, based in Lagos — hybrid, with 3 days per week in the office. You'll be the most senior individual contributor on the backend, owning the architecture of a platform where real money moves through real-time systems: wallet and ledger, bet engine, live betting, settlement, copy-betting, and social infrastructure. You'll set the technical direction, make the decisions that are expensive to reverse, and remain hands-on in the code. This is a role for an engineer who has built and operated serious distributed systems at scale and wants their architectural judgement to shape a platform from its foundations.

What You'll Do

• Own the backend architecture across .NET 8+, PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, and AWS/EKS
• Design the systems that must never be wrong: double-entry wallet ledger, bet placement and settlement, cash-out, and payment flows
• Set standards for event-driven design, idempotency, consistency, and failure handling across all services
• Lead the hardest technical work personally — the highest-risk integrations, the trickiest concurrency problems, the performance bottlenecks
• Run architecture and design reviews, and mentor senior engineers into stronger system designers
• Define non-functional requirements — latency budgets, availability targets, capacity plans for peak fixtures — and drive the platform to meet them
• Own observability, incident response practices, and post-mortem culture across backend services
• Evaluate build-vs-buy decisions and third-party providers (trading feeds, payments, fraud, KYC) with commercial as well as technical judgement
• Work directly with the founders and Head of Engineering on the technical roadmap

What We're Looking For

• 8+ years of backend engineering experience, with several years operating at staff/principal level
• Deep, current expertise in C# / .NET and the surrounding ecosystem
• A proven track record architecting distributed, event-driven systems in production — ideally where money, trades, or bets flowed through them
• Expert-level understanding of data consistency, transactions, idempotency, and exactly-once processing
• Strong production experience with PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, and AWS; Kubernetes/EKS strongly preferred
• Demonstrated ability to lead through influence: design docs, reviews, and mentorship rather than authority
• Sound judgement on trade-offs — you know when to be rigorous and when to ship
• Excellent written and verbal communication with technical and non-technical audiences

Nice to Have

• Experience in sportsbook, gaming, trading, or payments platforms specifically
• Experience integrating managed trading/odds providers
• Prior experience as an early or founding engineer at a startup
• Exposure to regulatory or audit requirements in a licensed industry