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:

• Bachelors degree Computer Science Information Technology or a related field (Masters 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.