Job location: Remote
About the role:
The Senior Software Engineer - Backend will work as part of the Digitization and Automation team to design, develop, and implement scalable technology solutions that solve a wide variety of business problems across the organization.
This role is primarily a backend engineering role, requiring strong software engineering fundamentals, system design expertise, and ownership of business-critical applications. In addition, the engineer will play a key role in identifying, designing, and building AI-powered solutions that improve operational efficiency, automation, decision-making, and developer productivity across the organization.
The ideal candidate combines strong backend engineering experience with practical experience building AI-powered applications, agents, copilots, retrieval systems, and workflow automations. They should be comfortable evaluating where AI adds value, designing appropriate system architectures, and mentoring other engineers on AI-related engineering practices.
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Design, build and integrate scalable and reliable backend systems based on business and product requirements.
- Identify and resolve bottlenecks, bugs, and operational issues.
- Drive improvements in scalability, performance, reliability, observability, and cost optimization.
- Create prototypes and proof-of-concepts for new products and features and do POC to validate new AI initiatives.
- Take complete ownership of projects from design through deployment and production support.
- Collaborate closely with Product Managers, Business Analysts, QA teams, and other engineering teams.
- Lead the establishment and evolution of Sun King's AI Engineering capabilities, including architecture, tooling, development standards, and best practices.
- Define and drive the AI technology stack, ensuring scalable, secure, reliable, and cost-effective adoption of AI across engineering and business workflows.
- Architect systems that combine LLMs, retrieval systems, business logic, databases, APIs, and operational tooling.
- Evaluate emerging AI technologies, frameworks, and models, and provide technical direction on their adoption and integration within the organization.
Mentor and guide engineers on backend architecture, AI system design, and implementation best practices, fostering AI expertise across the team.
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- Experience with messaging systems such as RabbitMQ, Kafka, or Amazon SQS.
- Experience with containerized deployments using Docker and Kubernetes.
- Experience building retrieval systems, semantic search, or knowledge assistants.
- Familiarity with agent frameworks and orchestration platforms.
- Experience integrating AI systems with enterprise applications, operational tooling, or internal platforms.
- Experience working with vector databases and embeddings.
- Experience building internal developer productivity or operational automation tools.
- Exposure to Model Context Protocol (MCP) or similar tool integration patterns.
- Strong curiosity for emerging technologies and willingness to continuously learn and experiment.
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Strong experience in designing and developing scalable REST-based micro-services and APIs using Java (Spring Boot) and Python.
- Strong experience with SQL, database design, and query optimization.
- Experience working with AWS services such as EC2, RDS and Lambda.
- Hands-on experience building AI-powered applications or workflows in production environments.
- Practical understanding of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures and their application to business problems.
- Experience designing and building AI agents, copilots, workflow assistants, or intelligent automation systems.
- Understanding of tool-calling, context management, prompt design, structured outputs, and hallucination mitigation techniques when integrating LLMs with business Systems, APIs and databases.
- Ability to design end-to-end AI-powered solutions that combine deterministic systems with LLM-driven reasoning.
- Prior experience mentoring engineers and leading technical initiatives.
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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.
Sun King is the world’s leading off-grid solar energy company, combining cutting-edge product design, fintech, and field operations to deliver energy access for the 1.8 billion people who live without an affordable and reliable electric-grid connection.
Sun King has built a new kind of energy utility: distributed, green, customer-centric, and affordable. We bring clean, reliable, decentralized energy directly into people’s lives — from solar kits that provide first-time energy access to multi-kilowatt systems that serve both off-grid users and grid-connected customers powering larger homes, schools, hospitals, farms, offices, and light manufacturing.
Already, 25 million homes and businesses rely on Sun King for electricity supply and the appliances and services it enables: lighting, televisions, fans, refrigeration, and smartphones.
Sun King combines energy generation, energy-efficient appliances, installation, and financing into one seamless offering. Think of it as a distributed utility, designed for wherever energy is needed and designed to scale with its users as incomes and energy needs grow.
Sun King makes solar products affordable to low-income households and businesses via ‘pay-as-you-go’ (PAYG) purchase financing. Sun King installs solar after customers pay a small deposit. Customers then make small, manageable payments of as little as US $0.14 a day via mobile money or cash.
Instead of paying for expensive, polluting, and health-damaging kerosene for lighting or diesel for power, customers unlock savings through accessing solar power and after one to two years of payments, customers own their solar equipment outright.
Sun King collects payments digitally through mobile money systems and its 35,000 field agents — over 1 million payments each day. To date, Sun King has extended more than $1.4 billion in PAYG loans to customers.
Sun King began by powering homes and businesses with solar systems delivered through PAYG financing. Now, we’re using the same model to make smartphones and clean cooking equipment affordable: helping households connect to the digital economy and transition from wood-based fuels to modern, sustainable alternatives.
Sun King employs 3,500 full-time staff in 14 countries, with specialties spanning product design, data science, logistics, customer service, sales, software, operations, and more — all with a passion to serve off-grid families. Sun King is committed to gender diversity in the workplace. Women represent 42% of Sun King’s workforce.
