Senior Backend Engineer

💙 Our mission

At NALA, we're building payments for the Next Billion. This means transforming how money moves into Africa, Asia and beyond. By building cutting-edge payment solutions, we’re simplifying financial transactions for individuals and businesses alike—helping them thrive in a global economy.

We’re driven by innovation, community, and the belief that everyone deserves access to reliable, efficient, and affordable financial services. If you’re passionate about creating meaningful change and shaping the future of fintech in Africa, Asia and beyond join us and be part of a team that's revolutionising financial empowerment on a global scale.

🙌 Your mission

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.

🎯 Your responsibilities in this role

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

⚒️ Our Tech Stack

• Services are written in Go, deployed in AWS ECS and communicate with our app with gRPC
• Our app is written in Dart with Flutter and available on both Android and iOS
• Our NALA for Business product is web only and written in React and Typescript.
• We use Postgres, Kafka, Redis and Vault
• We use and leverage AWS as much as possible and we manage it with Terraform
• We write unit and integration tests, do code reviews and deploy multiple times a day
• We use Agile frameworks and also use Jira to manage

🔥 Must have job requirements

• 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

💪 Nice to have job requirements

• 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)

🎤 Interview Process

If successful you will be selected for our interview process which has 4 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.

⭐️ Benefits

UK / EU / Remote, we have the following benefits:

• 35 Days Off: Enjoy an amazing 35 days of holidays to unwind and explore (This will be 27 days + 8 Bank Holidays if UK-based)
• Birthday Leave: Celebrate your special day with a bonus day off to take off in that month.
• Enhanced Parental Leave - We offer 16 weeks of full pay for the primary caregiver and 4 weeks of full pay for the secondary caregiver (After your probationary period)
• Global Workspace: Get access to WeWork locations worldwide.
• LearningBudget: Fuel your growth with $1000 annually for learning and development.

For people who come to our London office;

• Hybrid Working: We work in our Canary Wharf Office four days a week (Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday).
• Sarabi: Themed snacks and Friday lunch focused on building great working relationships with the team.
• Monthly Socials: Join fun social events every month for great times.
• Free Coffee: Enjoy barista-style coffee at your fingertips.