API Engineer - Digital Payments

Job Title: API Engineer - Digital Payments

Employment type: Contract (On-site)

Contract length: 6 months (with potential extension)

Location: Accra, Ghana (including travel across West and Central Africa)

PURPOSE OF THE PROJECT

The API Engineer will design, develop, test and integrate secure, reliable REST APIs that enable payment and digital banking use cases. The role will work across client and platform teams to define API contracts, resolve integration issues, and improve developer enablement through clear documentation and reusable assets.

Core Responsibilities and Accountabilities:

• Design REST APIs and define clear resource models, request and response structures, error handling, and versioning approaches.
• Develop, configure, or extend API services and integration components in line with agreed architecture and security standards.
• Create and maintain OpenAPI specifications, developer documentation, sample payloads, and integration guides.
• Execute unit, functional, integration, and performance testing; diagnose defects using logs, traces, and API test evidence.
• Support authentication and authorisation patterns, input validation, rate limiting, and secure handling of sensitive data.
• Collaborate with client developers, integration specialists, and Java engineers to resolve dependencies and accelerate onboarding.
• Contribute reusable API assets, testing collections, and implementation runbooks.

Knowledge and Experience:

• Strong experience in REST API design, development, testing, and systems integration.
• Hands-on experience with JSON, REST, HTTP, OpenAPI / Swagger, and API testing tools such as Postman.
• Understanding of API security patterns, including OAuth 2.0, authentication, authorisation, and secure error handling.
• Experience troubleshooting distributed integrations using logs, monitoring, and trace information.
• Good software engineering practices, including Git-based version control, automated testing, and code review.
• Ability to collaborate effectively with client and partner development teams.

Mandatory Skills:

• Bachelor's degree Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field (Master's preferred).
• Previous experience within Banking, Digital Payment & Card solutions, or the FinTech industry.
• Regional experience, including working in a faced-paced matrix organisation.
• Excellent communication skills in English (written, verbal, and presentation), French is advantageous.
• Willingness to travel across West and Central Africa may be relevant for subsequent phases.

Preferred Skills:

• Exposure to financial services, payment platforms, gateways, developer portals, or developer enablement.
• Experience with API management platforms and cloud-native or microservices environments.
• Knowledge of asynchronous integration, webhooks, messaging or event-driven patterns.

Expected Deliverables:

• A clear discovery and implementation plan aligned with the assigned client workstream.
• High-quality technical or analytical outputs, supported by appropriate testing, validation, and documentation.
• Timely identification and escalation of delivery risks, dependencies and data or integration blockers.
• Reusable implementation assets, runbooks and structured knowledge transfer to relevant client and delivery teams.