Senior Backend Engineer, Squad T-Rex

👋 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 and 2026.

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

Squad T-Rex's mission is to build the best wallet as the foundation for more financial products, and offer competitive and reliable cross-border payments to Africa and beyond.

This includes things like:

• Scaling our wallet product offering as a new growth engine, giving customers easy access to multi-currency wallets backed by stablecoins or banking providers.
• Expanding our wallet offering into new markets, making multi-currency financial infrastructure accessible to customers globally.
• Growing our customer base by launching in new countries.
• Building B2B products that leverage wallet infrastructure processing hundreds of millions of dollars in transaction volume.

We are building the wallet and the accounts infrastructure that the rest of NALA stands on.

We need a strong Senior / Lead Engineer (ideally with financial systems experience) who can take ownership of figuring out the right ways to build a robust wallet & foundation that can scale with us.

🎯 Your Responsibilities in this Role

• Own key architecture and implementation decisions for NALA's wallet and Global Accounts foundation
• 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
• Build the infrastructure behind virtual account provisioning, starting with US virtual account details for non-resident customers, and lift pre-generated wallet delegation success rates
• Help launch Global Accounts into additional markets and kick off our stablecoin card capability
• Drive engineering quality across API standards, testing strategy, code review bar, and maintainability
• Manage delivery by breaking down complex work, sequencing milestones, and keeping projects moving end to end
• Make pragmatic trade-offs: move fast where we can, protect correctness where we must (especially in systems handling real customer money)
• Join our on-call rota once a month for 1 week (This will be fully compensated + post onboarding)

🚫 Read This Before You Apply

To set you up for success, we want to be explicit about how engineering works here:

• We build depth before breadth. Engineers typically start by embedding deeply in a product squad, learning the domain, how we operate as a business, and earning trust through delivery. Broader, cross-cutting impact follows from that foundation.
• This is a high-pace, VC-backed environment. Priorities can shift quickly and ambiguity is normal. We are looking for people who stay calm, make good calls with imperfect information, and keep momentum.
• Ownership includes alignment. We expect engineers to drive work end to end and collaborate with other engineers, follow chapter standards, and bring others along, so solutions scale beyond one person.
• Collaboration is part of the craft. We value consultation, design reviews, and feedback loops because they help us build better systems and avoid rework. We value autonomy, but not lone-wolf engineering.

🔥 Must-have requirements

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

Skills

• Requirement gathering
• You do not just take tickets and build
• You quiz PMs, challenge stakeholders, and push on solutions that do not make sense
• You do not accept proposals from non-technical people at face value, you turn business intent into something technically sound
• Design-first (this is a must)
• You are not someone who “thinks by coding”
• You draw diagrams, write RFCs, explore hypotheses, and visualise systems at a high level
• Freestyling into implementation without alignment is not your style
• Engineering quality
• You care about good API design and reusability
• You write unit-testable code and advocate for quality during code reviews
• Especially in financial systems, “it works” is not the bar
• Disciplined execution
• You can own complex projects end to end
• You avoid excessive context switching and push back when too many parallel things risk delaying delivery
• You care about finishing work properly, not just “mostly done”

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

Behaviours

• Calm, decisive, and effective in ambiguous environments
• Collaborative by default, aligns early, communicates clearly, and brings others along
• High ownership with high standards, accountable for outcomes, not just output
• Pragmatic, not dogmatic, knows where we can compromise to move fast and where we absolutely should not

💪 Nice to have requirements

• 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

✅ Success in the role looks like

3-Month Metrics

• Embedded in the squad with strong domain understanding and trusted relationships across PM and Engineering
• Be fully onboarded and acquainted with our ceremonies and engineering processes / SDLC.
• One or more high-leverage components on the Global Accounts roadmap delivered end to end with the quality bar met (tests, reviews, observability hooks and fully inline with our DoD)

6-Month Metrics

• Core wallet & Global Accounts foundation is production-grade and scaling (reliable, observable, maintainable)
• Virtual account provisioning and wallet APIs are stable with clear standards and strong developer experience
• Delivery cadence is predictable, complex work shipped in milestones without constant churn or rework
• Engineering quality bar is visibly raised (API consistency, testability, review rigour, and operational readiness)

➡️ Interview Process

Before you apply, take a look at our Extra Preparation guide, covering our engineering philosophy, tech stack, and what to expect at each interview stage.

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:

• 45 mins 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.
• We usually split this call into a 30-minute intro, and if time permits, we invite an Engineering Manager to join for 15 minutes, where you'd be asked to read through some code with them
• 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
• 45 mins - Bar raiser interview with Markus, Head of Engineering
• The final interview will involve speaking with Markus 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 those specifically UK-based, we also have;

• Private Medical Insurance: Full medical cover through a leading UK provider, because your health comes first.
• Life Insurance: 3x salary cover, giving you and your family peace of mind.
• Enhanced Pension: Salary sacrifice pension scheme via Penfold giving you flexibility and control on how you save for your future! (Applies to UK)

For people who come to our London office we also have the following;

• 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.