Lead Engineer, NALA

• 🧠 Design-First Thinking
• You value clarity before code. You love making architecture diagrams, writing RFCs, and visualising systems. You prefer collaborative planning over jumping straight into implementation and you guide others to do the same
• 💬 Stakeholder-Driven but Critical
• You’re confident gathering requirements and probing for clarity. You challenge proposals that don’t make technical sense, working with PMs and stakeholders to shape robust, realistic solutions
• 🧼 Quality Code Advocate
• You care deeply about design patterns, single responsibility principles, reusable code, and great API design. You write testable, maintainable systems and expect the same from those around you
• ⚖️ Pragmatic and Strategic
• You know when to build for the long-term and when to cut corners responsibly. You’re comfortable with some technical debt, if there’s a plan to resolve it and you push back when shortcuts put the product at risk. You communicate trade-offs clearly and diplomatically
• You have at least 5+ years of experience building highly reliable and scalable backend services in Go
• You have worked in a scale / start-up environment and enjoy delivering awesome products quickly
• Experience with RDBMSs such as Postgres, MySQL etc
• Experience with message-brokers technologies such as Kafka, RabbitMQ etc, working within event-driven architectures
• You have excellent knowledge of the best practices in designing, developing and deploying those services in a cloud environment
• You have experience working asynchronously with global teams using tools like Slack/Teams/Jira as well as other modern communication systems
• Passionate about our product and the mission that we are on
• You are fluent in written and spoken English

Desirable

• As a Lead Backend Engineer, you’ll play a key role in shaping Rafiki’s backend architecture and ensuring we continue to deliver reliable, high-performing payment infrastructure
• You’ll lead critical engineering efforts, mentor teammates, and work closely with cross-functional teams
• In your first few months, you’ll take the lead on projects like:
• Scaling Treasury Tooling
• Build internal tools that give our traders and treasury ops teams real-time visibility into balances, flows, and provider allocations—empowering faster and smarter funding decisions across markets
• Upgrading Finance Infrastructure
• Help design and implement a scalable ledger and reconciliation system to bring accuracy, auditability, and automation to FX, disbursements, and collections
• Launching New Financial Products
• Develop backend infrastructure for innovative products like post-funding models, credit lines, and client settlement in hard currencies, while Rafiki manages FX risk and liquidity
• Beyond those initial projects, you’ll also:
• Lead the development of Go-based backend services, ensuring high performance, reliability, and scalability
• Design and evolve our customer-facing APIs, powering integrations that allow clients to send, receive, and convert funds seamlessly
• Build modular systems that enable rapid expansion into new markets with diverse regulatory and operational requirements
• Implement critical compliance functionality, including KYB, identity verification, AML, and fraud detection
• Automate operational workflows and partner failover systems to minimise downtime and support overhead
• Use data and insights to drive product and engineering decisions
• Mentor engineers, drive technical excellence, and contribute to a strong engineering culture