Backend Engineer

👋 Hi, we are Masref! Let us introduce ourselves...

Have you ever wondered whether you can access your money which you have in your checking or savings bank account? Or whether that money will lose 90% of its value within a single year? This is the sad reality people in Lebanon, Argentina, and Turkey have faced in the past few years. If only they had easy access to banking products located in safer economies where they can hold USD, millions would have avoided these losses.

🪄 That’s what Masref aims to do. Masref is helping people from Lebanon save USD in Switzerland without requiring them to deposit millions or physically be present in Switzerland. Users can open a Masref account with a smartphone and a passport, and start using Masref to keep their savings. We are building Masref to have the highest levels of KYC and AML technologies in order to be compliant with the Swiss regulations and to give users the comfort of knowing their money has the highest level of security.

We have recently completed YCombinator and raised our seed-round from a number of prominent VCs and angel investors, and we are looking to hire our first engineer to help us accelerate the process of building our MVP.

What we're looking for

As a backend engineer for Masref, you will be our first engineering hire, and you will take lead on everything backend from integrating with 3rd party providers and services for KYC, AML and banking products, to building a secure API for our frontend. Our current services are built on AWS and written in nestjs, but we accept candidates with no prior nestjs experience. You will work super closely with our CTO, who is a full-stack/frontend engineer, on building a robust user-centered product. In this role you will wear many hats: prioritizing, designing, and building different parts of our service.

This is a high-impact position. We expect you to have ownership over significant parts of the backend, and to leverage the help of the rest of the team to what you see best for out service. We are looking for someone who can thrive with little guidance (i.e. someone who can set their own tasks and goals to align with the business goals).

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and own important subsystems of our infrastructure and development environment. This includes our service architecture, service reliability, build and release, engineering operational health, security, and integration with compliance and banking services. Core languages, tools, and tech that we use include: NestJS, AWS, CircleCI, Prisma + PostgreSQL.
• Adopt a user-centered agile mentality. As an early-stage startup, we expect things to rapidly change and new requirements to come up from week to week which may require adjusting priorities. Such an environment comes with its own challenges, and we expect you to respond to changes quickly.
• Proactively contribute to system health, identifying weak spots in our codebase and infrastructure, and prioritizing new projects to improve them. Bring your own experience and expertise to influence early system decisions.
• Scale the engineering team! Drive adoption of paradigms and technology to continually improve the quality of our codebase and product. Interview candidates and help with engineering recruiting as we rapidly grow. Define new engineering processes to accelerate our growth, improve team organization, and support your teammates. 🙌

Qualifications

• Breadth in platform and infra knowledge: You are familiar with a range of engineering functions that allow us to robustly scale our infrastructure and team. You’re comfortable reasoning about topics such as backend architecture, databases, site reliability, infrastructure as code, and continuous deployment.
• Supporting fellow coworkers: You care about the operational health of the team, and about supporting other coworkers to iterate quickly on the product and to ship fast. You are knowledgeable about techniques for improving developer operations, and are excited by the prospect of enabling other coworkers to do their best work.
• Backend software engineering: You love building software systems and optimizing them. You can write backend business logic as needed. You have solid software engineering fundamentals, and enjoy thinking about clean software principles, layered abstractions, and complexity tradeoffs.
• Business-oriented decision maker: You understand that build you build is meant to support underlying product and business goals. Your technical decision making is deeply informed by the relevant business context. You know how to navigate questions about speed versus quality.
• Designing secure systems: You are comfortable building and managing the complexity of a financial services system with all its high security requirements. You enjoy designing robust systems that will withstand any penetration attempts.