Principal Backend Architect – Scale High-Throughput Systems

KingMakers; Cape Town; Hybrid; ZAR 1,000,000 - 1,800,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work model

Health & wellbeing

Liberty Life Pension Fund

20 days annual leave

Birthday day off

Parking

High-performance laptop

Team activities

Performance bonus

Job summary

KingMakers in Cape Town, South Africa, seeks a Principal Backend Engineer to shape architecture and technical direction for a high-throughput platform. You will lead backend and cloud initiatives, guide teams, and drive scalable, observable systems.

You will design and implement distributed services, mentor engineers, and collaborate with product leadership to align technical strategy with business goals. This hybrid role requires strong engineering rigor.

Qualifications

• 10+ years engineering leadership delivering large-scale, distributed systems.
• Experience with cloud architectures (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) and DevOps (CI/CD).
• Strong ability to prevent and address production incidents; excellent communication.

Responsibilities

• Architect the future: design and evolve distributed systems for high throughput.
• Provide technical leadership and mentor teams.
• Optimize performance across services for availability and latency.
• Drive reliability with monitoring and incident practices.
• Collaborate with product and business leaders to translate ideas into strategy.
• Lead by example: write and review code to ensure quality.
• Participate in on-call rotations for critical systems.

Skills

Engineering leadership

Cloud architectures

DevOps CI/CD

Microservices

Kafka & RabbitMQ

C# or others

Incident management

Unit testing

Communication skills

iGaming experience

Tools

SQL Server

MongoDB

CosmosDB

Redis

Grafana

Kibana

Application Insights

Job description

KingMakers in Cape Town, South Africa, seeks a Principal Backend Engineer to shape architecture and technical direction for a high-throughput platform. You will lead backend and cloud initiatives, guide teams, and drive scalable, observable systems.

You will design and implement distributed services, mentor engineers, and collaborate with product leadership to align technical strategy with business goals. This hybrid role requires strong engineering rigor.