Lead Engineer, NALA
Rafiki
More information about location
4 days a week in office (Canary Wharf, London)
African and Asia cross-border payments company
Open for applications
African and Asia cross-border payments company
101-200 employees
Open for applications
More information about location
4 days a week in office (Canary Wharf, London)
101-200 employees
Company mission
To increase economic opportunity on the African continent and for its diaspora around the world.
Role
Who you are
- 5+ years building scalable, reliable backend systems using Go
- Experience in high-growth or startup environments
- Deep knowledge of RDBMSs like Postgres or MySQL
- Familiarity with event-driven architectures and tools like Kafka or RabbitMQ
- Strong cloud infrastructure experience, preferably with AWS and Terraform
- Comfortable working async with global teams via tools like Slack, Jira
- Passionate about payments and Rafiki’s mission
- Fluent in written and spoken English
Desirable
- Fintech or payments experience
- Prior work in a tech startup
- Exposure to information security practices
- Experience designing polished, developer-friendly APIs (REST/GraphQL)
What the job involves
- As a Lead Backend Engineer, you’ll shape Rafiki’s backend systems to ensure our payment infrastructure remains fast, reliable, and scalable
- You’ll lead engineering projects, mentor teammates, and build tools that power financial innovation across Africa
- Lead the design and development of Go-based backend services, optimised for scale and reliability
- Design and evolve Rafiki’s APIs to power seamless client integrations across global markets
- Build internal tools that enhance treasury and finance operations with real-time data visibility
- Implement core compliance infrastructure including KYB, AML, and fraud detection features
- Drive automation of operational workflows and ensure high system uptime with failover solutions
- Use metrics and insights to guide technical decisions and product prioritisation
- Coach engineers and foster a culture of high performance and engineering excellence
- 3-Month Metrics
- Treasury tooling deployed with real-time provider balance visibility
- Design and implementation plan for finance ledger and reconciliation system
- Stable, high-quality backend contributions and peer mentorship
- 6-Month Metrics
- Go-based services and APIs powering at least one new financial product
- Improved infrastructure reliability with automated failover in place
- Significant engineering velocity and reduced support overhead via system automation
Application process
- You will need to first submit your application through our ATS Workable. There is no need to submit a Cover Letter
- If successful you will be selected for our interview process which has 4 interviewing stages:
- [30mins] Interview with the Talent Team
- This is our initial touchpoint. We're keen to understand your motivations and experiences better. As a tip, reflecting on why you applied for this role and being familiar with your application responses will be beneficial
- [1 hour] Coding Challenge
- You’ll complete a pair programming exercise live, with two of our engineers
- [1 hour] Architecture Interview
- You’ll solve an architecture challenge with two of our Engineering Managers
- [30 mins] Interview with the CTO or Hiring Manager
- The final interview will involve speaking with the CTO about your motivation for the role and will be a great opportunity to ask any questions you have about the business
- References
- We conduct reference checks as standard for all of our hires at NALA
- Decision
- We’ll aim to come back to you with a timely decision and feedback on your overall interview process
Salary benchmarks
Our take
As global enterprise has become more interwoven, and Africa grows as an economic powerhouse, financial infrastructure has failed to keep pace with growing demand. Nala is providing the financial services to meet that gap.
The company started in Tanzania as a consumer payments aggregator and has used that platform to launch a remittance business rooted in its connections with East Africa, driving down the eye-watering 10% fees for its diaspora userbase.
The FinTech startup is now looking to double down on the lucrative remittance business, onboarding more users in its newly licensed areas: the U.S. and France.
While NALA has had some success with the products its built so far, the true test for the company will be navigating the deeply complicated international infrastructure necessary for an international payments platform, all while retaining their consumer-friendly credentials.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Jul 2024
$40m
SERIES A
Jan 2022
$10m
SEED
Total funding: $50.3m
Company benefits
- 35 Days Off: Enjoy an amazing 35 days of holidays to unwind and explore (this includes bank holidays)
- Learning Budget: Fuel your growth with $1000 annually for learning and development.
- Competitive Equity Offer
- Global Workspace: Get access to WeWork locations worldwide.
- Birthday Leave: Celebrate your special day with a bonus day off to take off in that month
- Enhanced Parental Leave - We offer 16 weeks full pay for the primary care giver and 4 week full pay for the secondary caregiver.
- If you're in London we have hybrid Working: We work 4 days a week in the office (Mon, Wed, Thur + Fri)
- Sarabi: Themed snacks and Friday lunch with a focus on building great working relationships with the team in our London office
- Monthly Socials: Join fun social events every month for great times
- Free Coffee: Enjoy barista-style coffee at your fingertips.
Company values
- 🔥 Customers First, Always We build NALA for our customers and not anyone else. This means whether you are in Sales, Marketing, Engineering or Finance, everyone needs to understand who our customers are, what problems we are solving and how we are competitive in the market.
- 🥇 Here to Win This is a competitive space and so we understand that the stakes are high. The prize is a huge, both in terms of monetary gain and personal achievement. Everyone at NALA comes into the company knowing what we are competing for.
- 🚄 Speed Wins Execution is the only defence. We prioritise doing and interating over agonising and waiting for “perfect”. When we ship new products and features, we learn about how this helps our customers which informs the second iteration.
- 🧠 Understand Why We ask why until we know the fundamental truth and insight that drives decision making. Through speaking to customers and deeply understanding our work, we are able to deliver game changing solutions for our customers.
Company HQ
Canary Wharf, London, UK
Articles
Leadership
Benjamin Fernandes
(CEO)A Tanzanian entrepreneur and former TV Presenter. Benjamin has spent time working in the Financial Services and Digital teams of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Also attended the Stanford School of Business and the Harvard School of Government.
Nicolas Esteves
(CTO + Co-Founder)Grew up in West Africa and brings 12 years of fintech experience including time spent building Osper and Monzo. Today Nicolas leads our engineering, data and fraud teams.
Nicolai Eddy
(COO + Co-Founder)Joined from Morningstar's quantitative index portfolios team. Nicolai, is based in our Nairobi office and leads our Rafiki business as well as treasury, finance, operations, and country teams.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at NALA
- At NALA we value ambition, speed and outcomes but never at the expense of respect. Our global team spans 30+ countries with many ethnicities, beliefs, backgrounds and ways of life. It is this diversity of thought and experience that allows us to drive innovative solutions amidst the competitive world of cross boarder payments.
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