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Tala is an AI-native credit infrastructure platform connecting global capital to emerging markets. The company has distributed over $9 billion to 14+ million customers across Africa, Latin America, and Asia, and has been recognized by Fortune, CNBC, and Forbes as a leading fintech innovator.
We are seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to join our Product Development team. This is a technical leadership role within our technical track, not a people-management position. You will own systems and initiatives spanning a domain, setting your own technical approach with minimal guidance. You will raise the domain's quality bar through design review and peer partnership, pushing the team toward a highly available, scalable, reliable, fault-tolerant, and performant microservices platform.
Key Responsibilities:
Design and Engineering: Design, develop, and maintain backend services, APIs, and data integration layers powering key product features. Author and defend engineering design documents (EDDs). Design and optimize database schemas and queries for performance and reliability. Meet project goals without sacrificing quality; pay down technical debt as part of delivery. Serve as the go-to expert for one or more technologies in your domain.
Quality, Review, and Standards: Hold the domain's engineering bar in code and design reviews, including work from other technical teams. Write clean, maintainable code following established standards. Contribute to testing infrastructure to increase backend module coverage. Verify AI-assisted changes to the same standard as hand-written code.
Reliability and Operations: Define alerting, SLIs, and SLOs; advance monitoring so availability and response times improve proactively. Handle incidents beyond runbook coverage; lead technical response for domain incidents and write RCAs. Troubleshoot and resolve technical issues quickly across development and production.
Delivery and Collaboration: Own delivery of domain roadmap work; participate in quarterly and sprint planning with feasibility perspective. Anticipate blockers before sprint commitment with problem statements and impact assessments. Work with Product and business stakeholders to remove ambiguity and define success. Own service design and implementation end-to-end. Keep domain tickets accurate and documentation complete. Work across multiple time zones using asynchronous communication.
Mentorship: Act as a dedicated mentor to junior and mid-level engineers with clear development goals. Technically lead and mentor a team of Backend Engineers building or extending complex modules.
Requirements:
- Fluency in English with clear written communication (essential for async, distributed work)
- Hands-on backend engineering experience designing, building, and operating applications in Java, Kotlin, and/or Scala, including web frameworks such as Spring
- Track record of leading and delivering multiple domain-significant projects validated in production over meaningful periods, including large-scale consumer applications on cloud infrastructure (AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure) using microservices architecture
- Subject-matter expertise in your own domain and conversance in adjacent ones; maintain a working mental model of wider company architecture
- Expert system design skills: design services and dependencies with security, maintainability, operability, and scale; author and defend EDDs; design for failure cases
- Expert REST API design and development knowledge for mobile and web
- Strong judgment and problem-framing ability: reframe poorly posed problems, decide with incomplete information, distinguish reversible from irreversible decisions
- Strong relational database experience (MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MS SQL) and strong non-relational database experience (Cassandra, Redshift, DynamoDB, HDFS)
- Define alert thresholds, SLIs, and SLOs; design for graceful degradation; ship features with monitoring in place; co-own Acceptance Test coverage decisions
- Security and compliance: follow Tala's security and privacy practices aligned with ISO-27001 and ISO-27701; follow OWASP secure coding practices; remediate vulnerabilities within established SLAs
- AI fluency: know when not to delegate to AI; decompose work into agent-sized units with explicit acceptance criteria; build reusable context assets and prompts; set verification bar for AI-assisted work; never put PII, borrower/credit data, secrets, or production credentials into prompts
- Own delivery of domain roadmap work; balance feature velocity against technical debt deliberately; own outcomes not task lists; track metrics your systems move
- Expert Agile development proficiency; strong prioritization and communication in fast-paced environments; strong drive for independent learning
