Job Specifications
Are you interested in shaping the future of content creation, distribution, and monetization in Africa? Do you want to define what content the next generation of mobile consumers in Africa will enjoy, while at the same time ensuring that local content creators make enough money from their hard work and creativity to support their families? And more importantly, do you care about how the African story is told and celebrated all over the world? If so, come join StarNews Mobile!
StarNews is a leading platform for African creators today, changing the way millions of people enjoy mobile content. Now available in six countries and growing, StarNews offers African content creators (local influencers, musicians, actors, comedians, athletes, beauty gurus, and fashion influencers) the opportunity to monetize their digital audiences in a meaningful way, while creating unique, exciting and exclusive local content for their audiences.
Working with Orange and MTN, we allow these amazing content creators to distribute and monetize their content to mobile consumers in Africa now and the global diaspora tomorrow. It is our mission to find and nurture the best African content creators who are going to tell the African narrative worldwide.
StarNews mobile is seeking: a Senior Full Stack .NET Engineer – Telecom Payment Gateway
We are seeking a Senior Full Stack .NET Engineer with expertise in .NET Core, JavaScript/Node.js, Vue.js, MySQL, AWS, and mandatory skills in Docker, Kubernetes (EKS/ECS), and Amazon SQS.
Role Overview:
This senior role includes building new services and maintaining, improving, and reverse-engineering an existing telecom payment platform that handles millions of transactions across Africa. You will lead architectural decisions, enhance platform reliability and performance, integrate with telecom operators, and troubleshoot complex production issues.
Responsibilities
Platform Ownership & Evolution
· Maintain, enhance, and modernize an existing telecom payment platform.
· Conduct reverse engineering of existing services, integrations, and legacy modules to understand functionality and dependencies.
· Refactor, optimize, and rewrite components for improved performance, maintainability, and scalability.
· Ensure smooth migration paths when replacing or upgrading legacy components.
Technical Leadership
· Lead system design, architecture reviews, and technology strategy.
· Define technical standards, best practices, and coding guidelines.
· Mentor and guide junior/mid-level engineers.
Backend Engineering (.NET / Node.js / JavaScript)
· Architect and develop .NET Core microservices for real-time payment workflows.
· Build and optimize Node.js (JavaScript) services for callbacks, routing, billing events, and operator integrations.
· Implement and manage Amazon SQS-based asynchronous processing pipelines.
· Ensure idempotency, durability, and accuracy of financial transactions.
Frontend Engineering (Vue.js / JavaScript)
· Lead development of Vue.js dashboards, admin tools, and operational interfaces.
· Improve user experience, performance, and internal usability.
Infrastructure & DevOps (AWS / Kubernetes / Docker)
· Deploy and orchestrate containers with Docker & Kubernetes (EKS/ECS) — mandatory.
· Architect and maintain AWS workloads (EC2, RDS, S3, Lambda, CloudWatch, SNS/SQS).
· Implement CI/CD automation, monitoring, alerting, and performance tuning.
Troubleshooting & Production Reliability
· Own complex production debugging, system-level troubleshooting, and incident response.
· Analyze logs, distributed traces, metrics, and operator callback flows to isolate and resolve issues.
· Drive root-cause analysis and preventive engineering.
Telecom & Payment System Integration
· Lead integrations with operators (IAM, Orange, Inwi) via DCB, SMS, USSD, and charging APIs.
· Understand and reverse-engineer existing operator flows and partner integrations.
· Ensure regulatory, security, and fraud-prevention compliance.
Required Qualifications
· 6+ years in backend or full stack engineering roles.
· Strong expertise in:
- .NET Core / C#
- JavaScript & Node.js
- Vue.js
- MySQL (advanced SQL, schema design, optimization)
· Mandatory Skills:
- Docker
- Kubernetes (EKS/ECS)
- Amazon SQS
· Preferred skills:
- Kafka, RabbitMQ, SNS
- Terraform or CloudFormation
- ELK, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog
- PCI-DSS or telecom security standards
- High-availability and fault-tolerant architectures
· Experience maintaining, improving, and reverse engineering existing systems.
· Strong AWS cloud foundations.
· Experience in telecom billing, DCB, SMS/USSD flows.
· Ability to troubleshoot large-scale, distributed, high-traffic systems.
· Fluency in French or Arabic is a plus, not require