NALA on cord

NALA

Senior Backend Engineer

External position
London, UK
Hiring internally for NALA?
FinTech
Payments for the next billion, in Africa!
Active
over 6 months ago
Posted
2 weeks ago
Checked
cord regularly checks that external positions are still open
10 hours ago

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Back End
Experience level: Senior
Core skills considered: APIs, API Testing, Agile, Scrum, Docker
Other skills considered: Kubernetes, Python, REST, Cloud Computing, Technical Writing

Logistics

Base salary: Undisclosed
Some companies on cord are unable to disclose salaries publicly due to internal company policies. Message the company for salary information.
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid (up to 1 remote day p/w)
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

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)

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

Company Benefits

  • 35 Days Off: Enjoy an amazing 35 days of holidays to unwind and explore.
  • Birthday Leave: Celebrate your special day with a bonus day off to take off in that month
  • Learning Budget: Fuel your growth with $1000 annually for learning and development.
  • Enhanced Sick Pay: It’s important to take time to recover
  • Enhanced Parental Leave: It’s the start of an amazing journey, take time to cherish priceless moments
  • Hybrid Working:* We work 3 days a week in the office (Mon, Wed, Fri)
  • Friday Breakky:** Start Fridays right with delicious breakfasts to boost your energy.
  • Global Workspace:** Get access to WeWork locations worldwide.
  • Monthly Socials:** Join fun social events every month for great times
  • Free Coffee:** Enjoy barista-style coffee at your fingertips.
  • Office Fun:** Play pool and table tennis when you need a break
  • Company Offsites: Join us in our Nairobi office to meet the whole team

(*if based in the UK)

(**These perks apply to hybrid positions)

Senior Backend Engineer at NALA
Position posted 2 weeks ago

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Starling Bank on cord

Starling Bank

Full Stack Engineer (ML Ops)

London, UK
FinTech · Banking · Finance
A better bank for everyone
Active
over 6 months ago
Responds to
0% of requests
Responds in
1h 55m
Requests
7 pending

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Full Stack
Experience level: Mid, Senior
Core skills considered: Java, React, Redux, AWS, JavaScript

Logistics

Base salary: £70K - £110K
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid (up to 2 remote days p/w)
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! Our vision is fast technology, fair service, and honest values. All at the tap of a phone, all the time.

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! We built a new kind of bank because we knew technology had the power to help people save, spend and manage their money in a new and transformative way.

We’re a fully licensed UK bank with the culture and spirit of a fast-moving, disruptive tech company. We’re a bank, but better: fairer, easier to use and designed to demystify money for everyone. We employ more than 3,000 people across our London, Southampton, Cardiff and Manchester offices.

Our technologists are at the very heart of Starling and enjoy working in a fast-paced environment that is all about building things, creating new stuff, and disruptive technology that keeps us on the cutting edge of fintech. We operate a flat structure to empower you to make decisions regardless of what your primary responsibilities may be, innovation and collaboration will be at the core of everything you do. Help is never far away in our open culture, you will find support in your team and from across the business, we are in this together!

The way to thrive and shine within Starling is to be a self-driven individual and be able to take full ownership of everything around you: From building things, designing, discovering, to sharing knowledge with your colleagues and making sure all processes are efficient and productive to deliver the best possible results for our customers. Our purpose is underpinned by five Starling values: Listen, Keep It Simple, Do The Right Thing, Own It, and Aim For Greatness.

Hybrid Working

We have a Hybrid approach to working here at Starling - our preference is that you're located within a commutable distance of one of our offices so that we're able to interact and collaborate in person. We don't like to mandate how much you visit the office and work from home, that's to be agreed upon between you and your manager.

Our Data Environment

Our Data teams are excited about the value of data within the business, powers our product decisions to improve things for our customers and enhance effective and agile decision making, regardless of what their primary tech stack may be. Hear from the team in our latest blogs or our case studies with Women in Tech.

We are looking for talented data professionals at all levels to join the team. We value people being engaged and caring about customers, caring about the code they write and the contribution they make to Starling. People with a broad ability to apply themselves to a multitude of problems and challenges, who can work across teams do great things here at Starling, to continue changing banking for good.

Requirements

We have built our entire banking platform in house and mostly in Java. We are looking for people who want to work on building the tooling that is used by our engineers on a daily basis.

We are looking for people who are truly full stack, and are as comfortable polishing their javascript front end as they are debugging the innards of their java applications database interactions, or standing up infrastructure with terraform. We are looking for people who can:

  • Design REST apis.
  • Code backend services, ideally using Java, or another other server side compiled language.
  • Develop modern front ends, ideally using React and Redux.
  • Get their code into the cloud and support it there, ideally on AWS.
  • Believe in clean coding, simple solutions, automated testing and continuous deployment.
  • Like to take ownership of a feature from the original idea through to live.
  • Think (like us) that a small number of empowered developers is the right way to deliver software.

Company Benefits

  • 33 days holiday (including flexible bank holidays)
  • An extra day’s holiday for your birthday
  • 16 hours paid volunteering time a year
  • Part-time and/or flexible hours available for most roles
  • Salary sacrifice, company enhanced pension scheme
  • Life insurance at 4x your salary
  • Hybrid/remote working
  • Private Medical Insurance with VitalityHealth including mental health support and cancer care. Partner benefits include discounts with Waitrose, Mr&Mrs Smith and Peloton
  • Generous family-friendly policies
  • Varied social groups set up and run by our employees
  • Perkbox membership giving access to retail discounts, a wellness platform for physical and mental health, and weekly free and boosted perks
  • Access to initiatives like Cycle to Work, Salary Sacrificed Gym partnerships and Electric Vehicle (EV) leasing

Full details are available on our careers site

Interview Process

Interviewing is a two way process and we want you to have the time and opportunity to get to know us, as much as we are getting to know you! Our interviews are conversational and we want to get the best from you, so come with questions and be curious. In general you can expect the below, following a chat with one of our Talent Team:

  • Stage 1 - 30 mins with one of the team
  • Stage 2 - Take home challenge
  • Stage 3 - 90 mins technical interview with two team members
  • Stage 3 - 45 min final with an executive and a member of the people team
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