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NALA is a fintech company building cross-border payments infrastructure for the next billion users. Since 2022, the company has grown 120x, scaled from 9 to 150+ employees, raised $50M+ from top-tier investors, and was named to the Forbes Fintech 50 in 2025 and 2026. NALA operates two core products: a consumer app enabling cheaper, faster, and more reliable cross-border payments from the UK, US, and EU to Africa and Asia; and Rafiki, a B2B payments infrastructure powering global payments. The team includes alumni from Wise, Stripe, Monzo, Revolut, and CashApp.
Squad T-Rex's mission is to build the best wallet as the foundation for more financial products and offer competitive, reliable cross-border payments to Africa and beyond. This includes scaling the wallet product offering as a growth engine with multi-currency wallets backed by stablecoins or banking providers, expanding into new markets, growing the customer base through new country launches, and building B2B products leveraging wallet infrastructure processing hundreds of millions in transaction volume.
As Senior Backend Engineer, you will own key architecture and implementation decisions for NALA's wallet and Global Accounts foundation. You will lead design work (RFCs, diagrams, API and system specs) to align on solutions before building, partner with the PM and stakeholders to translate business intent into technically sound requirements, and build infrastructure behind virtual account provisioning, starting with US virtual account details for non-resident customers. You will help launch Global Accounts into additional markets, kick off stablecoin card capability, and drive engineering quality across API standards, testing strategy, code review bar, and maintainability. You will manage delivery by breaking down complex work, sequencing milestones, and keeping projects moving end to end, making pragmatic trade-offs between speed and correctness, especially in systems handling real customer money. You will join the on-call rota once a month for one week (fully compensated post-onboarding).
The company emphasizes building depth before breadth, with engineers typically embedding deeply in a product squad first. This is a high-pace, VC-backed environment where priorities can shift quickly and ambiguity is normal. Ownership includes alignment and collaboration; the company values consultation, design reviews, and feedback loops to build better systems and avoid rework.
REQUIREMENTS:
Must-Have Knowledge:
- 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
Must-Have Skills:
- Requirement gathering: quiz PMs, challenge stakeholders, push on solutions that don't make sense, turn business intent into technically sound proposals
- Design-first approach: draw diagrams, write RFCs, explore hypotheses, visualize systems at a high level; not someone who "thinks by coding"
- Engineering quality: care about good API design and reusability, write unit-testable code, advocate for quality during code reviews; in financial systems, "it works" is not the bar
- Disciplined execution: own complex projects end to end, avoid excessive context switching, care about finishing work properly
Must-Have 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
Must-Have Behaviours:
- Calm, decisive, and effective in ambiguous environments
- Collaborative by default, aligns early, communicates clearly, brings others along
- High ownership with high standards, accountable for outcomes, not just output
- Pragmatic, not dogmatic, knows where to compromise to move fast and where to absolutely not compromise
Nice-to-Have:
- Experience building financial systems (payments, wallets, ledgers, reconciliation, stablecoins)
- Experience designing customer-facing APIs and infrastructure that scale to millions of consumers
- Comfort with operationally-heavy systems, including observability, incident response, failure modes, and resilience patterns
- Exposure to stablecoins or crypto rails
