Overview

Join to apply for the Senior Backend Engineer role at NALA

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.

• 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

We operate two core products: NALA (consumer app) and Rafiki (B2B payments infrastructure). Our team includes alumni from Wise, Stripe, Monzo, Revolut, and CashApp. 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 continents by contributing to the development and design of our core components for NALA. For details on current focus areas, tech stack, or working style, please refer to 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 delivering on our mission of increasing economic opportunities for working migrants globally.

Key projects you may work on in the first months include:

• Build business-facing features with the frontend team
• Integrate with payment partners to offer fast and reliable payments across many countries
• Implement core business logic such as KYB, Identification Verification, AML and fraud monitoring to keep customers safe
• Write modular and configurable code to rapidly launch new countries
• Use data to drive decision making and identify customer insights
• Automate processes and partner failover to reduce support load
• 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 (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ) in event-driven architectures
• Strong knowledge of designing, developing and deploying services in a cloud environment
• Experience working asynchronously with global teams using Slack/Teams/Jira and other modern tools
• Passionate about our product and the mission
• Fluent in written and spoken English

Nice to have requirements

• Experience in Fintech and Payments
• Experience in a tech startup
• Experience in information security
• Experience in creating robust, well-documented server-to-server APIs (REST/GraphQL)

Success in the role looks like

3-Month Metrics

• Own and deliver initial integrations: complete at least one major payment partner integration
• Implement foundational compliance logic (KYB, Identification Verification, AML) to improve safety
• Collaborate across teams to ship business-facing features end-to-end

6-Month Metrics

• Lead a high-impact technical project (e.g., multi-country rollout or API improvements)
• Improve system resilience with automated failover or retry logic
• Optimize and scale services; resolve performance bottlenecks
• Mentor and uplift peers through code reviews and knowledge sharing

Interview Process

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

If successful, you will be selected for four interview stages:

• [30 mins] Interview with Talent Team
• [1 hour] Coding Challenge (pair programming)
• [1 hour] Architecture Interview
• [30 mins] Interview with CTO or Hiring Manager
• References
• Decision

Benefits

UK / EU / Remote, with the following benefits:

• 35 days off per year (27 days + 8 bank holidays if UK-based)
• Birthday leave
• Enhanced parental leave: 16 weeks full pay for primary caregiver, 4 weeks full pay for secondary caregiver (after probation)
• Enhanced pension: salary sacrifice via Penfold
• Global workspace access (WeWork)
• Learning budget: $1000 annually

Location & Perks

For people who come to our London office: Hybrid working (Canary Wharf) 4 days a week, Sarabi snacks, monthly socials, free coffee.

Seniority level

• Mid-Senior level

Employment type

• Full-time

Job function

• Information Technology

Industries

• IT Services and IT Consulting

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