About the Company
Company Name: NALA
Location: London, England, United Kingdom
Overview:
NALA is building Payments for the Next Billion, focusing on faster, smarter, and fairer transfers for everyone. Since 2022, we've grown our business 120x, expanding our team from 9 to over 150. We operate two core products:
- A consumer app for cross-border payments, making transfers cheaper, faster, and more reliable for the global diaspora, allowing users to send money from the UK, US, and EU to Africa and Asia.
- A B2B payments infrastructure powering global payments.
Our team includes alumni from Wise, Stripe, Monzo, Revolut, and CashApp. We prioritize urgency, deep thinking, and customer-first approaches. At NALA, this isn’t just a job; it’s about ownership, impact, and the chance to change global payments forever.
About the Role
Job Title: Senior Backend Engineer
Employment Type: Full-time
Department: Engineering
Location: Remote
Your Mission
- Enhance digital payment systems and infrastructure for the African and Asian continents by contributing to the development and design of our core components and tools of our Rafiki web service API.
Responsibilities
- Build business-facing features with the frontend team.
- Integrate with payment partners for fast and reliable payments across many countries.
- Implement core business logic (e.g., Know Your Business, Identification Verification, Anti Money Laundering, fraud monitoring).
- Quickly launch new countries by writing modular and configurable code.
- Use data to drive decision-making and identify customer insights.
- Automate processes and partner failover to reduce support load.
- Contribute to customer-facing REST API core functionalities.
Must-Have Requirements
- 5+ years of experience building highly reliable and scalable backend services in Go.
- Experience with RDBMSs (Postgres, MySQL).
- Familiarity with message-broker technologies (Kafka, RabbitMQ) in event-driven architectures.
- Excellent knowledge of best practices in designing, developing, and deploying services in a cloud environment.
- Experience working asynchronously with global teams using tools like Slack, Teams, and Jira.
- Passionate about our product and mission.
- Fluent in written and spoken English.
Nice-to-Have Requirements
- Experience in Fintech and Payments.
- Experience in a tech startup.
- Knowledge in information security.
- Experience in creating robust, well-documented server-to-server APIs (e.g., REST, GraphQL).
Success Metrics
3-Month Metrics
- Own and deliver initial integrations: Complete at least one major payment partner integration.
- Contribute to Rafiki API development: Actively design and implement core Rafiki web service API features.
- Implement foundational compliance logic: Build and deploy modules for KYB, Identification Verification, or AML.
- Collaborate across teams: Build strong relationships with frontend, product, and infra teams.
6-Month Metrics
- Lead a high-impact technical project: Drive architecture and delivery of a significant backend service or API enhancement.
- Improve system resilience: Design and implement automated failover or retry logic for critical payment flows.
- Optimize and scale services: Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks; contribute to scaling systems.
- Mentor and uplift peers: Actively mentor junior engineers and improve team practices.
Interview Process
- Submit your application through our ATS Workable (no cover letter needed).
- Interview stages:
- 30 minsInterview with the Talent Team.
- 1 hourCoding Challenge (pair programming exercise).
- 1 hourArchitecture Interview (architecture challenge).
- 30 minsInterview with the CTO or Hiring Manager.
Benefits
