Senior Backend Engineer

About Us

NALA is building Payments for the Next Billion. Faster, smarter, and fairer transfers for everyone. Since 2022, we've grown our business 120x, grown the team from 9 to 150+, raised $50M+ from top-tier investors, and were named to the Forbes Fintech 50 in 2025 and 2026.

We operate two core products:

• NALA, our consumer app making cross-border payments cheaper, faster and more reliable for the global diaspora. Allowing users to send money from the UK, US and EU to Africa and Asia.
• Rafiki, our B2B payments infrastructure, is powering global payments.

Our team includes alumni from Wise, Stripe, Monzo, Revolut, and CashApp — operators who’ve scaled world-class products. We act with urgency, think deeply, and put our customers first always.

Your Mission

Collections & Treasury is the squad building a new collections product and the financial backbone other parts of the business will stand on. This includes things like:

• Building the infrastructure to spin up vIBANs on demand
• Designing customer-facing APIs to collect money through different payment strategies
• Handling the real-world challenge of collections across the African continent (this is not simply credit cards, for example STK)

This is not just another product squad. We are building the financial backbone that other things will stand on. We need a strong Senior / Lead Engineer (ideally with financial systems experience) who can take ownership of figuring out the right ways to build a robust Collections & Treasury foundation that can scale with us.

Your Responsibilities in this Role

• Own key architecture and implementation decisions for the collections & treasury foundation
• Lead design work (RFCs, diagrams, API and system specs) to align on solutions before building
• Partner with PMs and stakeholders to translate business intent into technically sound requirements
• Design and build customer-facing and internal APIs to support collections and payment strategies
• Build reliable infrastructure for vIBAN provisioning and collections orchestration
• Drive engineering quality across API standards, testing strategy, code review bar, and maintainability
• Manage delivery by breaking down complex work, sequencing milestones, and keeping projects moving end to end
• Make pragmatic trade-offs: move fast where we can, protect correctness where we must (especially in financial systems)

What this role is not

To set you up for success, we want to be explicit about how engineering works here: We build depth before breadth. Engineers typically start by embedding deeply in a product squad, learning the domain, how we operate as a business, and earning trust through delivery. Broader, cross-cutting impact follows from that foundation.

This is a high-pace, VC-backed environment. Priorities can shift quickly and ambiguity is normal. We are looking for people who stay calm, make good calls with imperfect information, and keep momentum.

Ownership includes alignment. We expect engineers to drive work end to end and collaborate with other engineers, follow chapter standards, and bring others along, so solutions scale beyond one person.

Collaboration is part of the craft. We value consultation, design reviews, and feedback loops because they help us build better systems and avoid rework. We value autonomy, but not lone-wolf engineering.

Must-have requirements

Knowledge

• Have worked with Go in a production environment
• How to translate business intent into technical requirements and clean system boundaries
• What “good” looks like in financial-grade systems, including correctness, reliability, auditability, and operational readiness
• Design principles that drive maintainability (single responsibility, separation of concerns, etc.)
• API fundamentals, including consistency, versioning, backward compatibility, and developer experience

Skills

• Requirement gathering
• You do not just take tickets and build
• You quiz PMs, challenge stakeholders, and push on solutions that do not make sense
• You do not accept proposals from non-technical people at face value, you turn business intent into something technically sound

Design-first (this is a must)

• You are not someone who “thinks by coding”
• You draw diagrams, write RFCs, explore hypotheses, and visualise systems at a high level
• Freestyling into implementation without alignment is not your style

Engineering quality

• You care about good API design and reusability
• You write unit-testable code and advocate for quality during code reviews
• Especially in financial systems, “it works” is not the bar

Disciplined execution

• You can own complex projects end to end
• You avoid excessive context switching and push back when too many parallel things risk delaying delivery
• You care about finishing work properly, not just “mostly done”

Experience

• Proven delivery of complex backend or distributed systems in a production environment
• Experience owning systems end to end, from design to build to ship to operate to iterate
• Experience working closely with PMs and stakeholders to shape solutions, not just implement them
• Experience making pragmatic trade-offs in startup environments, balancing speed, correctness, and scope

Behaviours

• Calm, decisive, and effective in ambiguous environments
• Collaborative by default, aligns early, communicates clearly, and brings others along
• High ownership with high standards, accountable for outcomes, not just output
• Pragmatic, not dogmatic, knows where we can compromise to move fast and where we absolutely should not

Nice to have requirements

• Experience building financial systems (payments, collections, treasury, ledgers, reconciliation)
• Familiarity with virtual account concepts (vIBANs) or provisioning and account lifecycle systems
• Experience designing public APIs used by external customers and partners
• Comfort with operationally-heavy systems, including observability, incident response, failure modes, and resilience patterns
• Experience working with region-specific payment methods (for example STK) or multi-rail payment orchestration

Success in the role looks like

3-Month Metrics

• Embedded in the squad with strong domain understanding and trusted relationships across PM and Engineering
• Be fully onboarded and acquainted with our ceremonies and engineering processes / SDLC.
• Requirements process running well, stakeholders aligned, assumptions surfaced early, fewer surprises mid-build
• One or more high-leverage components delivered end to end with the quality bar met (tests, reviews, observability hooks and fully inline with our DoD)

6-Month Metrics

• Core collections & treasury foundation is production-grade and scaling (reliable, observable, maintainable)
• Customer-facing APIs and orchestration paths are stable with clear standards and strong developer experience
• Delivery cadence is predictable, complex work shipped in milestones without constant churn or rework
• Engineering quality bar is visibly raised (API consistency, testability, review rigour, and operational readiness)

Interview Process

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
• [45 mins] Bar raiser interview with Markus, Head of Engineering - The final interview will involve speaking with the Head of Engineering 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.
• Learning Budget: Fuel your growth with $1000 annually for learning and development.
• For people who come to our London office; Private Medical Insurance: Full medical cover through a leading UK provider, because your health comes first.
• Life Insurance: 3x salary cover, giving you and your family peace of mind.
• Enhanced Pension: Salary sacrifice pension scheme via Penfold giving you flexibility and control on how you save for your future! (Applies to UK)
• 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.