Senior Backend Engineer

Job description

👋 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.

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.

At NALA, this isn’t just a job. It’s ownership, impact, and the chance to change global payments forever.

Join us in building [Payments for the Next Billion

🙌 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. If you’d like to learn more about what our teams are focusing on, tech stack or how we work, please use this link for our Notion page.

🎯 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

🔥 Must-have 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 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)

✅ Success in the role looks like

3-Month Metrics

• Own and Deliver Initial Integrations: Complete at least one major payment partner integration to expand NALA’s reach across target markets.
• Contribute to Rafiki API Development: Actively contribute to the design and implementation of core Rafiki web service API features for external business use.
• Implement Foundational Compliance Logic: Help build and deploy modules for Know Your Business (KYB), Identification Verification, or AML to improve platform safety.
• Collaborate Across Teams: Build strong working relationships with frontend, product, and infra teams to ship business-facing features end-to-end.

6-Month Metrics

• Lead a High-Impact Technical Project: Drive the architecture and delivery of a significant backend service or API enhancement (e.g. multi-country rollout or customer-facing API improvements).
• Improve System Resilience: Design and implement automated failover or retry logic for at least one critical payment flow to reduce downtime and improve customer experience.
• Optimize and Scale Services: Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks in payment infrastructure; contribute to scaling systems for increased volume.
• Mentor and Uplift Peers: Actively mentor junior engineers and contribute to improving team practices through code reviews, knowledge sharing, or tooling enhancements.

➡️ Interview Process

You will need to first submit your application through our ATS Workable. There is no need to submit a Cover Letter.

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

• [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.
• Learning Budget: 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.