Lead Engineer - Rafiki

At Rafiki, we’re building Africa’s most reliable payment infrastructure for global businesses. Payment reliability is one of the most critical challenges for businesses operating across Africa. We’ve seen this firsthand through our own NALA App and consistently hear the same pain points from users of platforms like LemFi, TapTapSend, SendWave, and Wise. Rafiki exists to solve this problem—once and for all. In just 12 months, Rafiki has grown from a 3-person team to 27, driven by strong demand from Africa’s business community. We’ve processed multi-million dollar disbursements in our first 3 months, and we’re just getting started.

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.

Your responsibilities in this role include:

• 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.

Our Tech Stack includes:

• 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 is 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.

How You Work:

• Design-First Thinking: You value clarity before code. You love making architecture diagrams, writing RFCs, and visualising systems.
• Stakeholder-Driven but Critical: You’re confident gathering requirements and probing for clarity.
• Quality Code Advocate: You care deeply about design patterns, single responsibility principles, reusable code, and great API design.
• Pragmatic and Strategic: You know when to build for the long-term and when to cut corners responsibly.

Must have job requirements:

• 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.

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).

Benefits:

• 35 Days Off: Enjoy an amazing 35 days of holidays to unwind and explore.
• 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 a 6-month probationary period).
• Global Workspace: Get access to WeWork locations worldwide.
• Learning Budget: Fuel your growth with $1000 annually for learning and development.
• Hybrid Working: We work in our Canary Wharf Office three 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.