Senior Backend Engineer

💙 Our Mission

📌 We are on a mission to increase economic opportunity for Africans globally.

Why does our mission matter?

There are over 1.3 billion Africans in the world. Africa is the most expensive place to send money to and trade with.

Talent is everywhere but opportunity isn’t. How do we bridge this divide with a sense of purpose?

• Think about people living far away from their loved ones who are financially responsible and support them. Imagine how you would feel losing 8-9% of your money through fees. How do we reduce the cost of sending money home through technology?
• What about the future of work? Think about those young TikTok influencers in Uganda who make amazing content, but can’t get paid because they don’t have Visa or Mastercards yet have mobile money?
• What about the future for businesses? Think about those who are trying to do cross-border business from Africa outbound to the rest of the world? Why is it so hard to trade today? Why do people have to send money with other people physically or cash on planes? How much money and time is lost while doing this?
• What about the reliability of trade? When payments are delayed, that means business is disrupted. This costs everyone money. It loses us trust with customers.

NALA’s true impact will be measured by the opportunities we create for Africa to trade with the world and the world to trade with Africa.

🙌 Your mission

Help us enhance the digital payment systems and infrastructure for the African continent by contributing to the development && design of our core components and tools of our Rafiki web service API.

🎯 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 diversify our offering to continue to deliver on our mission of increasing economic opportunities for Africans 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

⚒️ Our Tech Stack

• Services are written in Go, deployed in AWS ECS and communicate with our app with gRPC
• Our app is written in Dart with Flutter and available on both Android and iOS
• Our NALA for Business product is web only and written in React and Typescript.
• We use Postgres, kafka, redis and vault
• We use and leverage AWS as much as possible and we manage it with Terraform
• We write unit and integration tests, do code reviews and deploy multiple times a day
• We use Agile frameworks and also use Jira to manage

🔥 Must have job 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
• You are passionate about our product and the mission that we are on
• You are are fluent in written and spoken English

💪 Nice to have job 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)