At a Glance
- Tasks: Build and scale infrastructure for fast, secure global payments.
- Company: Join NALA, a rapidly growing fintech startup transforming payments.
- Benefits: 27 days off, birthday leave, enhanced parental leave, and a learning budget.
- Other info: Dynamic team culture with monthly socials and free coffee.
- Why this job: Make a real impact in the fintech space with cutting-edge technology.
- Qualifications: Experience with AWS, Terraform, and containerised workloads required.
The predicted salary is between 60000 - 80000 £ per year.
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 & 2026. We operate two core products: NALA, our consumer app makes 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. At NALA, this isn’t just a job. It’s ownership, impact, and the chance to change global payments forever.
Your Mission
Your mission is to build and scale the infrastructure that powers fast, reliable and secure global payments at NALA. You’ll help create resilient systems, developer platforms and cloud foundations that enable engineering teams to ship confidently at high velocity.
Your Responsibilities in this Role
- Build and improve the cloud infrastructure powering NALA and Rafiki, ensuring high availability, scalability and security across our systems.
- Improve developer experience through automation, self-serve tooling and infrastructure-as-code practices that increase engineering velocity.
- Own and evolve our observability, incident response and reliability practices to minimise downtime and improve system performance.
- Partner closely with product and engineering teams to support new services, migrations and platform improvements across the business.
- Strengthen our security posture by implementing best practices across networking, access controls, secrets management and production environments.
- Continuously improve CI/CD pipelines and deployment workflows to enable safe, fast and reliable releases.
Must-have requirements
- Experience building and operating production infrastructure on AWS (preferably), GCP or similar cloud platforms.
- Strong experience with Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform.
- Experience managing containerised workloads using ECS and Docker in production environments.
- Strong hands-on experience operating and scaling infrastructure components such as Kafka, Redis and managed relational databases like RDS.
- Strong understanding of networking, security, observability and distributed systems fundamentals.
- Experience improving CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation in fast-moving engineering teams.
- Comfortable debugging production issues and participating in incident response in high-availability environments.
- Clear communication skills and the ability to work closely with software engineers across multiple teams.
Nice to have requirements
- Experience working in fintech, payments or other regulated environments.
- Experience building internal developer platforms or self-serve infrastructure tooling.
- Experience supporting SOC2, ISO27001 or similar compliance initiatives.
Success in the role looks like
- 3-Month Metrics: Successfully onboarded into NALA’s infrastructure stack, deployment workflows and engineering processes. Delivered meaningful improvements to infrastructure reliability, deployment speed or observability tooling. Built strong working relationships with engineering teams and actively supported platform and production needs.
- 6-Month Metrics: Reduced operational bottlenecks through automation and infrastructure improvements that measurably improve developer velocity. Improved platform reliability, monitoring coverage and incident response processes across critical systems. Played a key role in scaling infrastructure to support increasing transaction volumes and product expansion.
Interview Process
You will need to first submit your application through our ATS Workable. If successful, you will be selected for our interview process which has 4 stages:
- [30mins] Interview with the Talent Team: In this stage we want to get to know you a bit more and follow up on your experience and motivations. The best preparation would be to really know why you applied for the role (i.e. your application questions).
- [60mins] Interview with the Hiring Manager: In this stage, we want to get to know you and your experience deeply and we will focus closely on your experience as detailed on your CV. The best preparation is to prepare to talk about your past experiences, and challenges. Be prepared to answer technical questions.
- [1hr] The Practical Assessment: In this stage, we want to see you in action. You’d be given the snippet of poorly written Terraform code and will be asked to review it live. Be prepared to debug and review code, along with communicating and discussing the issues you see.
- [45mins] Leadership interview: The final interview will involve speaking with a member of our leadership team about your motivation for the role and will be a great opportunity to ask any questions you have about the business.
Benefits
- 27 Days Off Plus UK Bank Holidays: Take the time to decompress. Working at a startup is hard!
- 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).
- Enhanced Pension: Salary sacrifice pension scheme via Penfold giving you flexibility and control on how you save for your future!
- Global Workspace: Get access to WeWork locations worldwide.
- Learning Budget: Fuel your growth with $1000 annually for learning and development.
- 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.
Senior Platform Engineer in London employer: Nala
NALA is an exceptional employer, offering a dynamic work culture that prioritises ownership and impact in the fintech space. With generous benefits like 27 days off plus bank holidays, enhanced parental leave, and a $1000 annual learning budget, employees are empowered to grow both personally and professionally. Located in a vibrant startup environment, NALA fosters collaboration and innovation, making it an ideal place for those looking to make a meaningful difference in global payments.
StudySmarter Expert Advice🤫
We think this is how you could land Senior Platform Engineer in London
✨Join Local Tech Meetups
Get out there and mingle with fellow developers by joining local tech meetups. It’s a fantastic way to meet people who might be working at Nala or know someone who does. Plus, you can pick up some trendy tech skills and trends while you're at it!
✨Contribute to Open Source Projects
Show off your coding chops by jumping into open-source projects. Not only does this give you practical experience, but it also gets you noticed in the dev community. You'll create a killer portfolio that speaks volumes about your skills to Nala.
✨Tap into Online Developer Communities
Don’t underestimate the power of online developer communities like GitHub, Stack Overflow, and even Reddit. Participate in discussions, share your projects, and build your visibility. We can often find opportunities through these channels that can lead to a full-time gig at companies like Nala.
✨Explore Job Boards Specifically for Tech Roles
Keep your eyes peeled on job boards that focus on tech roles. Sites like TechCareers or Stack Overflow Jobs can often have listings for companies like Nala that might not show up on broader job sites. Make it a habit to check these regularly, and don’t hesitate to apply directly through our website!
We think you need these skills to ace Senior Platform Engineer in London
Some tips for your application 🫡
Show off your coding skills:When applying for a software engineering role, it's super important to showcase your coding skills. Make sure your CV includes your tech stack, any relevant programming languages you’re comfortable with, and examples of projects you've worked on. If you have a GitHub profile, link it up! We love to see code in action.
Tailor your portfolio:For a full-time role, we’d expect to see some solid examples of your work in your portfolio. Make sure to include at least two or three projects that highlight your problem-solving skills and your ability to work with different technologies. Focus on the projects that are most relevant to the position at Nala.
Craft a killer cover letter:Your cover letter is your chance to stand out—make it personal! Explain why you want to work at Nala and how your skills align with the role. Show us your passion for software development. We dig enthusiastic candidates who understand the value of collaboration and continuous learning!
Be clear and concise:When it comes to writing your CV and cover letter, clarity is key. Avoid jargon that could confuse us and stick to simple, direct language. Highlight your achievements with quantifiable results where possible, and keep everything easy to read. A well-organised application goes a long way!
How to prepare for a job interview at Nala
✨Brush Up on Your Coding Skills
For a full-time software engineering role, it's crucial that we stay sharp with our coding abilities. Expect technical questions that might involve solving problems on the spot or discussing algorithms. Practise on platforms like LeetCode or HackerRank to get comfortable with the types of questions that often come up.
✨Know Your Tools and Frameworks
Make sure we’re well-acquainted with the tools and technologies listed in the job description. Familiarise ourselves with any specific frameworks or programming languages mentioned. If Nala uses React or Node.js, for instance, be ready to discuss how we’ve used them in previous projects or coursework.
✨Showcase Your Projects
Bring along a portfolio that highlights our best work. This could be code samples, GitHub repositories, or any side projects we’ve built. Make sure we can talk through our thought process for each project, especially the challenges we faced and how we solved them—this shows our problem-solving skills in action.
✨Prepare for Behavioural Questions
While technical skills are key, full-time positions also require cultural fit. Be ready to discuss our previous experiences and how we handle teamwork, conflict, and deadlines. Brush up on the STAR method—Situation, Task, Action, Result—to clearly articulate our past experiences when discussing how we've contributed to a team.
