Senior Backend Engineer, NALA
More information about location
African and Asia cross-border payments company
Be an early applicant
African and Asia cross-border payments company
101-200 employees
Be an early applicant
More information about location
101-200 employees
Company mission
To increase economic opportunity on the African continent and for its diaspora around the world.
Role
Who you are
- You have at least 5+ years of experience building highly reliable and scalable backend services in Go
- 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
- You have experience working in Fintech and Payments
- You have experience working in a tech startup
- Experience in infosec
- Experience in creating robust, well-polished and documented server-to-server APIs for customers access (E.g. REST/GraphQL)
What the job involves
- Help us enhance the digital payment systems and infrastructure for the African and Asian continent by contributing to the development & design of our core components and tools of our Rafiki web service API. If you'd like to know more about what our teams are focusing on, tech stack or how we work,
- We are looking for a Senior Backend Engineer who is experienced in Go to help us take the NALA business product to the next level. Following impressive growth, we are diversifying our offering to continue to deliver on our mission of increasing economic opportunities for working migrants globally
- Specifically we want to open up NALA’s payment rails to customers via API, enabling corporates to send, receive and convert funds through NALA directly from their own systems
- We are deeply passionate about the communities we serve and we hope you will share our drive to deliver world class software and to achieve our ambitious goals
- Whilst projects change from sprint to sprint, these are the types of projects that we expect you will be getting involved in in the first few months of your time at NALA:
- Build business facing features together with the frontend team
- Integrate with payment partners to offer fast and reliable payments across many countries
- Implement core business logic such as Know Your Business, Identification Verification, Anti Money Laundering and fraud monitoring to keep our customers safe
- Quickly launch new countries by writing modular and configurable code to adapt to market specific and evolving requirements
- Use data to drive decision making and identify customer insights
- Automate processes and partner failover to reduce support load and keep our customers happy
- Contribute to our customer-facing REST API core functionalities
- 3-Month Metrics
- Own and Deliver Initial Integrations: Complete at least one major payment partner integration to expand NALA’s reach across target markets
- Contribute to Rafiki API Development: Actively contribute to the design and implementation of core Rafiki web service API features for external business use
- Implement Foundational Compliance Logic: Help build and deploy modules for Know Your Business (KYB), Identification Verification, or AML to improve platform safety
- Collaborate Across Teams: Build strong working relationships with frontend, product, and infra teams to ship business-facing features end-to-end
- 6-Month Metrics
- Lead a High-Impact Technical Project: Drive the architecture and delivery of a significant backend service or API enhancement (e.g. multi-country rollout or customer-facing API improvements)
- Improve System Resilience: Design and implement automated failover or retry logic for at least one critical payment flow to reduce downtime and improve customer experience
- Optimize and Scale Services: Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks in payment infrastructure; contribute to scaling systems for increased volume
- Mentor and Uplift Peers: Actively mentor junior engineers and contribute to improving team practices through code reviews, knowledge sharing, or tooling enhancements
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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