Senior Backend Engineer (Go)

Key Information

Application Method: Please apply via our application portal here (https://apply.workable.com/nalamoney/). We are not actively reviewing this platform 🙏

Role: Senior Backend Engineer (Go)

Reports Into: CTO

Compensation: Competitive local rates and significant equity benchmarked to London. Please do let us know if this is outside of your expectations and we are more than happy to discuss further and look after every situation on a case by case basis depending on experience and interview performance.

Location: We are a fully remote team distributed +/- 3hrs from London. We are able to employ anyone from this time zone.

Accessibility and Inclusion: We want every interview to be as comfortable so you can focus on showing us as much of you as possible. Our interviews are typically conducted via Zoom. If there are adjustments we can make to assist you in the hiring process, please do let us know in the application.

The Role

We are looking for a Senior Backend Engineer who is experienced in Go to help us take the Nala app to the next level. Following an extremely successful funding round, we are ready to scale the app to encompass more countries and currencies providing 21st century payment to the African continent and its diaspora. 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 customer 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 Customer, 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
• Build internal tools and integrations for our support and marketing teams
• Automate processes and partner failover to reduce support load and keep our customers happy

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
• We use Postgres, kafka, redis and vault
• We keep our services size strictly above micro, we like simple and easy to maintain infrastructure
• 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 kanban to manage our tasks in Jira

Is this you?

We know that finding a job can be stressful. It can be really hard to tick all the boxes for any job description however we encourage you to apply even if you cannot tick every single of the box. Here is what we are looking for:

• You have at least 5+ years of experience building highly reliable and scalable backend services in Go
• 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 either our product and the mission that we are on
• You are are fluent in written and spoken English

These are some nice to haves that would really get our attention:

• You have experience working in Fintech and Payments
• You have experience working in a tech startup
• Experience with crypto currencies development
• Experience in infosec
• In addition to English, you can also speak French or Swahili

Benefits

• We are fully remote! You can work wherever you like so long as you can work within 3 hours of London time
• We do 2 company trips per year (sometimes more! 👀) Check out our last trip to Zanzibar in Dec 2021 🌴🏖😎
• Everyone in any region can expense up to $1000 equivalent a year to support themselves on personal development. * This can include books, conferences, courses etc - anything to help you do your job better or help you grow your career.
• We offer 35 days holiday inclusive of any Public Holidays that exist in your country.
• We provide computer equipment for everyone

Interview Process

Stage 0: Application Review

We fully recognise that interviewing is a time intensive thing and we are not in the business of wasting anyone's time. We have a super simple application process which requires just a CV, 3 application questions and an optional cover letter. We will predominantly use the CV and application questions to determine if you have the skills and motivation to work at Nala. If you would like add any other information that you think will be important, please feel free to use the cover letter to highlight this.

Stage 1: Talent Interview

This will be a 30min conversation with our Talent Team where we want to learn more about you and your experience. We will dig deeper into the projects that you have been involved with an emphasis on greenfield projects (i.e. projects from scratch) and architecting new projects.

Stage 2: Pair Programming Interview

This will be a 1hr pair programming session with the CTO. We want to assess your programming skills in the most fair and consistent way possible. On the day of the interview, we will share a GitHub repo with you containing a challenge. The task is to write some code to solve the problem with our CTO. We are hoping to see your ability to breakdown the issue, design a solution and write code that you would be proud to say was yours.

Stage 3: Architecture Interview

This will be a 1hr architecture whiteboarding session with the CTO. This will be working of a feature request that we have previously. We would love to hear you walk through with us how you would tackle the problems, walking us through the various considerations you have. For online interviews on Zoom, you will have the freedom to use whatever whiteboarding software you are used to.

Stage 4: Leadership Interview

This will be a 30min conversation with our CEO. Nala is uniquely an African company with a global team and we are passionate about building a culture that aligns with this vision. In this interview we would love to learn more about your passions in life and how a role at Nala can help on your own career journey.

Our Mission

We are on a mission to increase economic activity on the African continent and for its diaspora around the world. By creating community-powered financial solutions, we make it easier to make day-to-day payments and do business in an increasingly global Africa. #BuildOurAfrica

About the Company

We are building Revolut for Africa. Over 80% of the money sent to Africa is done with physical cash. The remaining 20% is done via digital channels but are subject to multiple layers of fees and paperwork. Our easy-to-use app allows anyone to quickly send money from GBP or USD (EUR coming soon!) to all major African currencies at the lowest rates available.

Payments in Africa are 1% built. We aspire to bring 21st century payment technology to Africa to create a low cost and highly reliable set of payment rails that friends, family and businesses can use. When payments are simple, reliable and available at the touch of a button, anything is possible.

We are proud to be an African Fintech Startup with a global team serving an international audience. By building payment channels and infrastructure, we enable lightning-fast payments to every corner of the African continent. Our tech is built by world-class engineers from around the world and we are proud to serve all communities, everyone from bustling cities to peaceful villages. It is our privilege to partner with these local communities go on this journey together.

We are supported by the world’s most prestigious accelerators and VCs. We are backed by Y-Combinator (early backers of AirBnB, DropBox, GitLab, etc), Accel (GoCardless, Monzo, etc), and a long list of high profile Angel Investors who were personally in building Monzo, Robinhood, ComplyAdvantage, Luno, Simple, and many more!